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Category Archives: vulnerability scan

Cybersecurity, IT Support, MSP, vulnerability scan

Can IT issues cause a drop in my employees’ and my company’s productivity?

25/05/2023 Marketing Department

Can IT issues cause a drop in my employees’ and my company’s productivity?

Information technology (IT) is an essential part of any modern business, and IT issues can cause significant problems that can affect employee and company productivity.

Employee productivity generally means either doing more work in less time or taking fewer hours to complete tasks. Increased employee engagement also improves morale which eventually reduces employee burnout.

Low productivity also results in poor performance by employees, affecting the quality of work and deliverables and, ultimately, your company’s profitability will decrease. It’s important to snub the low productivity issue at the core, which, oftentimes, comes from IT-related issues.

What are some IT-related issues in the workplace?

Software malfunctions
Freezing computers
Scanner or printer issues
Old computer systems
Annoying pop-ups
Internet connectivity issues
Viruses and malware
Learning to navigate new updates

How IT issues can cause a drop in productivity

Downtime: IT issues can lead to downtime, which is the period when IT systems are not functioning correctly. Downtime can be caused by hardware failures, software crashes or network connectivity issues. Downtime can lead to a loss of productivity as employees are unable to perform their work, leading to delays in projects and missed deadlines. Network issues can also cause employees to miss online calendar alerts for meetings, events, calls and time-crucial emails, impacting sales, customer relationships and company reputation.
Slow systems: Slow systems can be caused by a lack of memory, outdated software or hardware issues which can lead to a decrease in productivity as employees are unable to complete their work as quickly as they would like. Slow systems can also lead to frustration, leading to a decrease in employee morale.
Data loss: IT issues can lead to data loss, which is the accidental or intentional loss of data. Data loss can be caused by hardware failures, software crashes or human error and can lead to a significant loss of productivity as employees are unable to access the necessary data to complete their work. Data loss can also lead to a loss of trust from customers and stakeholders, which can have long-lasting effects on the company’s reputation.
Cyber Security breaches: Cyber Security breaches can be caused by a lack of security measures, outdated software or human error. Cyber Security breaches can lead to a loss of productivity as employees are unable to access the necessary systems or data, as well as a loss of trust from customers and stakeholders, leading to a significant impact on the company’s reputation.
Support tickets: IT issues can lead to an increase in support tickets, which are requests for IT support from employees. An increase in support tickets can lead to a decrease in productivity as employees are unable to complete their work while waiting for IT support. An increase in support tickets can also lead to frustration, leading to a decrease in employee morale. Not only that, waiting for issues to be fixed can prevent employees from supporting your customers, resulting in company productivity.

How can managed IT services boost productivity?

Increased Uptime: Ensure your IT systems are up and running when you need them as MSPs use a proactive approach to fixing issues by constantly monitoring and fixing issues remotely.

Reduced need for IT support: Less need for in-house IT support as the MSP takes control and responsibility for the management of your systems to prevent issues from arising. When problems do occur, the majority of the time they are resolved quickly and efficiently.

Improved Employee Satisfaction: When employees don’t need to worry about whether or not their systems are working, they become more satisfied with their jobs and will be able to perform at their best.

More time for strategic tasks: By outsourcing your company’s IT systems, there is no need for employees to spend time on troubleshooting, that is, figuring out what is wrong and trying different solutions, or handling system updates. Employees can instead, focus on their jobs.

Better use of technology: MSPs can help your business get the most out of its technology as they’re able to teach you how to fully use your existing systems as well as keep your systems up-to-date with new updates that can help employees. As software continuously becomes more complex, underutilising features can mean missed opportunities for your business.

Reduced IT costs: Your business will no longer need to invest in expensive hardware and software updates and it will be easier to predict and manage your IT budget. This way, you can utilise your spending on other areas of business that will help your employees.

Increased competitiveness: Using an MSP ensures your business’ IT systems are on the same level as others. This software and hardware are usually included in your MSP’s cost. Something as simple as upgraded hard drives can make computers run faster and improve employee productivity.

It might be helpful to ask your IT service provider for some tips on preventive measures for common IT problems which you can then share around your workplace to avoid unnecessary delays in the future as employees can fix issues themselves. This will also prevent many support tickets from being submitted. Most of us are more tech-savvy than we were a few years ago, so it’s a great idea to utilise your staff for smaller IT issues, even if it’s for something as minor as changing a printer ink cartridge.

Continuous training and performance support are crucial for staff, either about how to fix issues or about learning to navigate modern software applications. As reported in a 2019 study by Deloitte, comprehensive training leads to a 218 per cent higher revenue per employee, so don’t skimp on your investments in technological solutions that allow for staff training. Each time a staff member is hired, give them a lesson on the programs they will be using as well as a checklist of IT issues that your team has learned how to fix over the years. That way, they don’t have to then ask another employee and interrupt their momentum when a minor issue arises. Low productivity of one employee often has a domino effect on the entire team.

IT issues can cause significant problems that can affect employee and company productivity. These issues can lead to downtime, slow systems, data loss, Cyber Security breaches and an increase in support tickets. Companies should take steps to prevent IT issues by investing in modern IT infrastructure, regularly updating software and hardware, implementing Cyber Security measures and providing IT support to employees. By taking these steps, companies can ensure that their employees can work effectively, leading to increased productivity and success for the company.

Cybersecurity, Managed IT Services, vulnerability scan

The ACSC’s Essential Eight Maturity Model

23/06/2022 Marketing Department

In today’s complex cyber landscape, businesses face a new set of challenges every day to keep up with the competition. Among all sorts of challenges, the primary and most common ones are the ones that occur online because of business reliability on internet. And, one category of these challenges that is putting businesses on edge is Cyberattacks. As the technology advances, these threats to businesses have also advanced. There is an unwanted and sharp rise in the occurrence of cyber-attacks all across the world. And, in terms of its victims, there is no exclusion; it could be an individual, a start-up, a small business, a government institution, a tech-giant, or literally anyone and everyone on the internet.

It is a choice of the individuals and businesses to maintain cybersecurity posture but looking at the grim consequences of cyberattacks, the Federal government is focussing on building Australia’s defences. And, as a precautionary advisory for its people, it has introduced the Essential Eight Maturity Model to have cybersecurity measures implemented within the organisations. This model consists of strategies that assesses potential risks like loopholes within a business framework and offers preventive measures against them to keep the business operations running smoothly.

What is the ACSC’s Essential Eight?

Essential Eight are the strategies developed and maintained by ACSC to mitigate or prevent cybersecurity incidents within Australia. These strategies can be applied across a broad spectrum of systems, networks and applications. These strategies rank three key areas: prevention, limitation and recovery by analysing their maturity levels.

Here are all the eight mitigation strategies:

Application Control: Running of only approved and trusted applications on the business network to prevent any exposure to the attackers.
Patch Applications: Regularly apply updates to all the installed applications to fix all the known vulnerabilities.
Configure Microsoft Office macro settings: The user’s ability to create macros should be limited as per the requirement.
User application hardening: User apps can be used to execute malicious malware on corporate systems, thus keep them to a minimum.
Restrict administrative privileges: Privileges of access should be restricted, managed, and constantly monitored as the more admins you have, the more will be chances for attackers to access business system through these accounts.
Patch operating systems: Implement the latest security updates to operating systems, servers, and all the devices to fix known vulnerabilities.
Multi-factor authentication: Ensuring two-level security for all the activities involving accessing emails, systems and third-party applications is the one of the best ways to stop unauthorised access to the business sensitive data.
Regular backups: Performing daily backups of important data, software and settings for at least a couple of months is important for business to continue to operate in the event of a security incident.

These are the eight strategies that are measured according to the below-mentioned maturity levels of a business:

Maturity Level 0: This maturity level signifies that there are weaknesses in an organisation’s overall cyber security posture.

Maturity Level 1: The focus of this maturity level is all the cyber attackers who are looking to simply leverage commodity tradecraft that is widely available in order to gain access to, and likely control of, systems of a business.

Maturity Level 2: The focus of this maturity level is attackers operating with a modest step-up in capability from the previous maturity level. These attackers are willing to invest more time in targeting a business and, perhaps more importantly, in the effectiveness of their tools.

Maturity Level 3: The focus of this maturity level is attackers who are more adaptive and much less reliant on public tools and techniques. These attackers are able to exploit the opportunities provided by weaknesses in their target’s cyber security posture, such as the existence of older software or inadequate logging and monitoring.

You can have a detailed look at the Essential Eight here: https://www.cyber.gov.au/acsc/view-all-content/publications/essential-eight-maturity-model

Although, these are some really helpful risk mitigation strategies that should be implemented, but still they are not sufficient to completely keep a business protected from cyberattacks. It needs continuous and consistent efforts to be protected from any kind of cyber threats. Businesses need to regularly identify the exposed areas that can be attacked by hackers, potential vulnerabilities and much more to stay ahead of the attackers.

Stay tuned to our Blogs to know more about how you can make the best of technology for your business.

Cybersecurity, vulnerability scan

Vulnerability Scanning: Getting the Fundamentals Right!

15/06/2022 Marketing Department

Businesses that comprehend the relationship between the dynamic and unique nature of the internet and the global threat scenario are the ones leading the path to win. Internet has become integral to almost all businesses. It has transformed dynamically over the years and has interconnected the world beautifully. It has entwined organisations, industries, people (good & bad) and everyone online in-between, including those who wish to cause harm to the organisations.

We have observed that the consequences of cyberattacks are becoming more severe and, in some cases, devastating, causing big institutions and organisations to completely shut down permanently. According to the report published by The Ponemon Institute on behalf of IBM, it takes businesses on an average 197 days to acknowledge a compromise made and 69 days to contain it (Institute, 2018).

To mitigate the end damage, there are many precautions that are put in place by the organisations, like data backup, data encryption, cybersecurity insurance, vulnerability and penetration testing, etc. All these practices have their own benefits and are best-fit according to the organisation’s demands. But, among all these factors, the first step that we can take towards cybersecurity is to identify the possible exposed areas within the business operations that can be exploited by adversaries. And, to analyse these potential areas of risk, vulnerability scans are conducted regularly.

Vulnerability Scanning

A vulnerability Scan can be defined as an automated process of identifying security vulnerabilities within an organisation across systems, software, and network infrastructure. Or, it can be defined as a scanning activity involving the identification of vulnerabilities of the hosts, operating systems, services, and applications by author Douglas Landoll in his book (Landoll, 2016). It is one of the fundamental parts of a cybersecurity risk assessment plan that can be conducted either in-house using some tools or with the help of a trusted IT partner.

Now, we can say that a vulnerability scan is the preliminary scan that assesses the IT network of an organisation and generates a report on the weaknesses, misconfigurations, and other flaws within the systems running in an organisation that need to be fixed. Now, the question is how will this scan and report assist me in achieving cybersecurity?

Benefits of Vulnerability Scanning

As discussed earlier, vulnerability scanning gives insights into the areas that are susceptible to cyberattacks. But, its advantages just do not end here. Here’s the list of benefits a business can experience by conducting regular vulnerability scans:

Acknowledge the risk level within the company’s IT infrastructure
A vulnerability scan generates a report of vulnerable areas that must be patched to prevent a cyberattack. The report outlines the risk level of the company by identifying the effectiveness of their cybersecurity measures, if any.

Proactive approach to acknowledge and close security gaps before they are exploited by cybercriminals
With almost all the vulnerabilities and flaws outlined in the report, these automated scans help discover the weaknesses that have the potential to be discovered by the hackers. As hackers also use automated tools the majority of the time, conducting these scans regularly is useful for identifying the potential exposed areas and taking restorative actions before cybercriminals can exploit them.

Improve the cybersecurity measures within the organisation
Upon identifying the potential risk areas, these scans bring out the urgency of improving the cybersecurity measures already followed within the organisation.

Enhances credibility with your partners, stakeholders, and clients
Keeping the crucial data and information secured from any kind of external threat will make all your current partners and client’s value and trust you more. Having a comprehensive security plan implemented and followed within the organisation increases its credibility and long-term relationship with the clients.

Now, that we know the first step towards being cybersecure is conducting vulnerability scans and knowing the potential areas of exploitation, should you be stopping just here?

What preventive measures or plans do you have in place to address these identified vulnerabilities?

Vulnerability scans are just the preliminary scans to identify the problems; they do not give us solution to mitigate the risk. To mitigate the risks involved, there are several ways that an organisation can follow that we will share in the next article.

Stay Tuned to our blogs to find out the preventive measures against cybersecurity.

References

Landoll, D. (2016). The Security Risk Assessment Handbook: A Complete Guide for Performing Security Risk Assessments, Second Edition. United States: CRC Press.

Ponemon Institute (2018). Cybersecurity Report.

Cybersecurity, Managed IT Services, vulnerability scan

Are You Aware of These 5 Reasons to Conduct Vulnerability Scan of Your Business Today?

18/05/2022 Marketing Department

Are You Aware of These 5 Reasons to Conduct Vulnerability Scan of Your Business Today?

Do you remember the last day when you didn’t hear about a cyberattack on a company? No, right? Cyberattacks have become really common these days, making cybersecurity an everyday hassle for businesses to focus upon. The shifting of more and more businesses to the cloud has resulted in a rise in data breaches. Hackers are going after companies of all sizes and, in some cases, even individuals. They are getting better at using technology and are motivated by their own self-interest. The rise in Cyberattacks have increased drastically within Australia as mentioned in the Annual Cyber Threat Report by ACSC

But, do you know how hackers attack a network of computers (s)?

The quickest way for hackers to get into a system is to look for vulnerabilities that they can exploit. By vulnerabilities, we mean any weakness within the IT infrastructure that a hacker can potentially detect and exploit. Therefore, for businesses storing data on their organisation’s network, it becomes crucial for businesses to have a set of cybersecurity measures in place to avoid cyberattacks.

The most important thing that businesses can do to prevent cyberattacks is to monitor their IT infrastructure for vulnerabilities. Running Vulnerability Scans identifies the same for businesses, motivating them to take urgent action. A Vulnerability Scan can be defined as a scan that identifies, analyses, and reports the security loopholes and potential areas of exploitation that can be targeted by hackers. These scans are conducted either by the internal IT team or are outsourced to Managed Service Security Providers.

Does your business need to conduct a Vulnerability Scan and, if so, how frequently?

The next thing to determine is whether or not your company actually requires this scan. The answer to it is “Yes.” Every business these days is using technology in one way or the other. Even if you are a small or family-owned business that only uses one or two computers, we suggest that every business that uses computers to store their data should conduct a Vulnerability Scan because hackers can exploit network weaknesses and destroy or misuse the stored data and information.

The main thing to understand is the number of times you should run vulnerability scans for the size of your business. We would suggest that, at the very least, it should be done once a quarter if not monthly or as soon as you’ve made a significant infrastructural or other IT architecture change.

Reasons to Conduct Vulnerability Scan Today

To Risk Profile your business for any vulnerabilities
Nowadays, no business can function without the internet. Every single time a computer uses the Internet, there is a high potential for a hacker to take advantage of some new vulnerability out there. If the system is not cybersecure, hackers can worm their way into a network and steal proprietary information and other data critical to a business. By running a vulnerability scan to identify the points of weakness in your systems, you can reduce the attack surface that criminals might exploit. In the last couple of years, cyberattacks broke into 62% of Australian SMBs. This shows how important it is for companies to have security measures in place.

To not fall victim to cyberattack occurring every 39 seconds
Research has shown that businesses are unknowingly vulnerable for 470 days before a cyber-attack. And, attackers have an average of 176 days to steal sensitive data and information before a vulnerability is discovered. Vulnerability scans help businesses detect potential vulnerabilities and minimise false positives to prevent future data breaches and remediate vulnerabilities before attackers exploit them.

To double-check the efficiency of cybersecurity measures in place
It is a common misconception among businesses that their MSP or IT support provider, who is in charge of their IT infrastructure, is also responsible for protecting them from cyberattacks; however, this is not always the case. They do not offer cybersecurity unless they are a MSSP (Managed Services Security Provider) or a specialist in cybersecurity. So, to ensure a secure environment to work in and the security measures in place, running a vulnerability scan is a good idea to start with.

To Avoid the Business Setback for an Average of 205 Days after a Cyberattack
According to the reports, the average time to fix critical cybersecurity vulnerabilities is 205 days. This means no work for almost 7 months, bringing a huge loss to the business and, in many cases, an unfortunate shut down too. Interestingly, there is 1 cybercrime report every 10 minutes & 144 approx. cybercrime reports every day by small and medium businesses, making it more crucial than ever before to deploy cybersecurity measures within all businesses.

To Avoid Paying Huge Ransom for Data Recovery Following a Cyberattack
The average total cost of a cyber data breach in Australia last year was $3.35 million per breach. That’s $163 per lost or stolen record, according to IBM’s 2020 Cost of a Data Breach Report. That’s due to each breach taking 296 days to identify and contain. To avoid shelling out your hard-earned money, the only way is to have a cybersecurity posture maintained within your business. You can start by running a vulnerability scan of your business to identify the potential areas of exploitation and the new vulnerabilities emerging every day.

If implemented correctly and ran on regular basis, vulnerability scans can prove to be instrumental in identifying and assessing modern security risk, highlighting the insights for urgent action(s) by the businesses for maintaining a strong cybersecurity across all the areas.

Take Your First Step Towards Cybersecurity With Us Today!

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Category Archives: vulnerability scan

Can IT issues cause a drop in my employees’ and my company’s productivity?

Can IT issues cause a drop in my employees’ and my company’s productivity?

What are some IT-related issues in the workplace?

How IT issues can cause a drop in productivity

How can managed IT services boost productivity?

The ACSC’s Essential Eight Maturity Model

Are You Aware of These 5 Reasons to Conduct Vulnerability Scan of Your Business Today?

Does your business need to conduct a Vulnerability Scan and, if so, how frequently?

Reasons to Conduct Vulnerability Scan Today

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