by Felicien | Aug 28, 2019 | Education
Get Your Beauty Sleep With Nightlight In Windows 10
You may have been using Windows 10 for some time now, but it’s likely that you haven’t mastered all of its features just yet.
If you, like so many others, use your computer late at night, before (or even in) bed, then you may have found that it throws off your sleep cycle. Despite being tired when you got into bed, after staring at the backlit screen for a few hours, you’re not as tired anymore.
This has to do with melatonin – a chemical produced by your body when your eyes see that it’s dark and determine its time for sleep. Looking at a bright screen throws off this natural process, and the lack of melatonin makes it harder to get to sleep.
Did you know you can reduce this effect with Nightlight?
Nightlight is a feature that lowers the brightness of the screen and changes the color spectrum in order to limit the interruption to melatonin production. To turn it on, find it under Settings, and set a schedule for it to follow based on your preferences for late-night computing.
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by Felicien | Aug 28, 2019 | Education
Why is Effective Business Continuity Management Important?
Business continuity management (BCM) denotes how organizations plan for and respond to risks. Mission-critical functions must continue to run after disruptions such as bad weather or hackers.
A business continuity plan documents how your organization will continue to operate after a natural or man-made disaster, severe market conditions or sudden changes in leadership. This could be anything from a stock market crash to a hurricane to the death or dire illness of a key leader. BCPs are hot topics thanks to growing legislation and increased risks related to data security and other events. Every organization would benefit from adopting some kind of BCP framework, however modest.
What is Business Continuity Management?
Business continuity management (BCM) denotes how organizations plan for and respond to risks. Mission-critical functions must continue to run after disruptions such as bad weather or hackers. Smart planning also makes it possible for employees to return to business as usual quickly.
How Does Business Continuity Work?
The most effective way to achieve transparent, seamless risk management and disaster recovery is via a business continuity management system. This may require some outside assistance since any BCMS adopted should follow international standard ISO 22301 requirements. All businesses can begin the first phase themselves, however, by building a continuity plan that identifies and minimizes risks.
What’s the Big Deal With ISO 22301?
ISO 22301 lays out a road map for an effective BCMS and is the most credible resource for successful business continuity management. Becoming ISO 22301-certified signals to clients that your company has a game plan in case disaster strikes — certification helps clients decide that your firm is a solid investment for their business.
This certification proves to prospective clients that your organization will continue to provide the products or services they need, even if an emergency arises. It also gives you an:
Independent evaluation of your business continuity management, providing assurance or offering areas for improvement
Accredited certification with regular audits to ensure continual improvement
Oversight of regulatory requirements to ensure legal compliance. This could include the EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) or new state and federal privacy regulations impacting customer data collection and storage.
What’s is Disaster Recovery vs. BCM?
People are often confused by the difference between these two terms. They aren’t synonyms. Business continuity deals with relocation and business functions while disaster recovery, which is a subset of business continuity, deals with the technical recovery of systems and resources.
Disaster recovery outlines how to recover technical functions, sites, operations and applications. A business continuity plan may contain many disaster recovery plans.
What Are the Key Components of a BCP?
A successful business continuity plan includes the following:
Succession plans for key employees
Identification of critical functions with priority identified
All employees’ contact information and role in the plan
Tested backup strategies
by Felicien | Aug 27, 2019 | Education
Mitigate Disaster with a Comprehensive Business Continuity Plan
When you create a detailed business continuity plan, you can keep disaster from disrupting your operations. See how to get started here.
When disaster strikes, disruptions to your operations could negatively impact your construction projects, pushing them past the deadline and over budget. And it is not just natural disasters you have to worry about, either.
Everything from serious IT problems to the loss of important team members has the potential to wipe out your operations. That is, unless you have a smart business continuity plan in place. With this plan, you can keep your operations moving along like normal, helping ensure the success of all your construction projects.
Importance of Having a Business Continuity Plan
In optimal conditions, there’s no doubt everything runs like clockwork, as your team works hard to complete their individual tasks. If anyone fails to come through, however, everything could grind to a halt. Furthermore, without writing it out, only a few in your company may know just what everyone should be working on and how it all comes together.
Therefore, you need a business continuity plan just in case serious disruptions leave you without certain team members, equipment, or workspaces. In many ways, this plan is a big-picture overview of everything that goes on at your construction firm. It also identifies all the workarounds you can use when faced with disruptions caused by different disaster scenarios.
Above all, your plan should detail who is in charge of each department in the absence of key players and all the ways they can keep moving forward in their daily duties. With that approach, you can keep major disruptions from throwing your workforce off track or preventing them from completing their tasks.
How to Create a Continuity Plan for Your Business
Without knowing what is on the horizon, there is really no time to waste in creating your business continuity plan. Thankfully, you can easily approach this process by using the following steps.
Take a Complete Inventory of Your Company
Taking inventory of your workforce, contacts, and equipment is the very first thing you must do to create your plan. You will likely need to take a big step back from your construction company to complete this step.
To start, create a list of all your employees, noting the major players in each department. Add their contact information in full, so you can find how to reach out at a glance. Then, create similar records of your material suppliers, clients, and other important contacts.
Next, you can move onto creating a complete inventory of all the equipment used on each of your job sites. Make sure to include their make, model, and serial numbers, so you can find parts or file claims as needed to keep things moving along. In addition, note any local parts suppliers, repair techs, and equipment dealers for those brands to complete your log.
Outline Existing Processes and Highlight Critical Areas
With the completion of the inventory step, you will need to look at your operations. Go from department to department, look at the duties of each employee and how they support other departments. Along the way, busy yourself with creating flowcharts for all the distinct processes used to run your construction company.
Throughout this process, identify your key operations and the major players you depend on to get the work done. Then, see who can fill in if those individuals cannot make it work. Also, add ways employees can workaround specific disruptions and continue to fulfill their core duties.
Identify Temporary Workstations and Keep Them Updated
If your core employees cannot get to their normal workstations, everything should not grind to a halt. But it will unless you have already identified temporary workstations and made the effort to keep them updated.
The workstations should have all the equipment and software normally used by the team and be completely ready for their use. So, create an update schedule and make sure the temporary workstations are included whenever you complete a major equipment or software upgrade. Furthermore, ensure your employees know about the existence of these workstations and how to access them.
Create Your Plan for Maintaining Critical Operations
With your understanding of your core operations, you can create a plan for each of your employees, helping them mitigate the effects of the disaster. Working across all departments, you will need to indicate who is responsible for getting each system back online and up to their normal operating levels. They should have a clear direction on the steps to take and the tools they will need to complete the assigned tasks.
Your plan should cover not only the construction tasks you are responsible for in that moment, but also all the administrative ones. You need to let your payroll department know how to proceed, for example, to ensure they can continue to process payments for all your employees.
Once you are finished creating your business continuity plan, store the main copy in a secure location and provide each department with their own copies.
Don’t Wait — Create Your Business Continuity Plan Today
So, now that you know what to do, there’s really no reason to wait. Start building your business continuity plan today to protect your operations from disaster. Otherwise, your employees could be left without the knowledge needed to keep your business afloat until everything returns to normal.
by Felicien | Aug 26, 2019 | Education
Are you working closely with your CFO to determine the most efficient and effective methods for maintaining your business infrastructure? These questions will help you drill in.
Are your financial operations taking more time and effort than you realize? There are plenty of ways to reduce the overhead and operations cost of your finance team, but that starts with asking your CFO some tough questions. Finding the right business solutions to support your organization begins with a thorough knowledge of the landscape and the pressure points and redundancies that could be relieved through automation. The answers that your CFO provides to these searching questions will help you make the right decisions when you consider upgrades to your technology infrastructure.
1. Are we addressing compliance issues that are concerning for our business?
Business compliance goes far beyond the requirements for HIPAA, personal privacy and employee security. Today’s compliance requirements are varied and complex for even the simplest organization. If you are capturing or maintaining personal information — much less financial or health information — chances are your business is subject to California’s Consumer Privacy Act and those of several other states, besides. You’ll find a comprehensive state-based map online at the International Association of Privacy Professionals. Ensuring that your data stays safe and that you’re fully complying with these laws often falls to the CFO in terms of education, but the technology team in terms of implementation of the strategies.
2. Where do you see slowdowns during monthly, quarterly and annual closing?
Closing the books is a process that happens on a regular basis, but that doesn’t mean it’s fully routinized. Even the simplest tweak to this ongoing process may be enough to save thousands of hours of productivity over a relatively short period of time. Looking closely at the business’s models for this ongoing operation can identify some weak points that can be addressed through automation or software updates.
3. What are the barriers to fully integrating metrics into our organization?
Using metrics throughout the organization is a great way to keep your business running smoothly — and also quickly identify areas that need a little extra attention. Are there systems that do not work well together? Perhaps a large variety of solutions providers whose “solutions” are causing problems with other business units? Whatever the issues are, identifying what it will take to get to a unified metrics system for the organization may point to some opportunities to apply consistency to your operations and platforms.
4. Are there opportunities to reduce the cost of delivering a secure and efficient infrastructure?
Providing a secure infrastructure for your business is a critical success factor, but are you currently knocking it out of the park — or falling down on the job? If your teams are frustrated with the speed of change and you’re concerned that your operations aren’t fully secure, you may have some work to do on your infrastructure. Even something as simple as slow WiFi or poor networking in conference rooms can reduce the effectiveness of your staff and boost frustration levels beyond the breaking point.
One key way to improve efficiency, reduce costs and heighten security is to work with advanced technical support staff to review your business operations and ensure that you’re taking full advantage of the opportunities available on the market today. Leaders at the largest organizations in the world routinely work with external service providers to ensure that they have access to the tools and technology needed to create a secure and consistent infrastructure for their business.
by Felicien | Aug 26, 2019 | Education
Microsoft Vulnerability Affects Most Recent Operating Systems
Learn about two recently discovered vulnerabilities that could put your company’s computers and operations at risk and what Microsoft is doing to fix the issue.
Two newly discovered security vulnerabilities could but Windows users at risk of attack if they do not download and install security patches Microsoft recently issued.
What Are the New Microsoft Security Flaws?
Nicknamed DejaBlue, the two security flaws are designated CVE-2019-1181 and CVE-2019-1182. They are similar to the BlueKeep vulnerabilities Microsoft issued patches for in May 2019. The newest flaws, like Bluekeep, could allow hackers to create so-called “wormable” attacks that easily can be spread from one computer to another without any interaction from a user.
The main difference is that the newer security vulnerabilities are potential threats to newer versions of Windows products.
What Systems Does DejaBlue Affect?
There are potentially hundreds of thousands of computers that could be affected by the Windows worm. The sit within the Windows Remote Desktop Services (RDS) package. According to Microsoft, the vulnerabilities could affect the following systems:
Windows 7 SP1
Windows Server 2008 R2 SP1
Windows Server 2012
Windows 8.1
Windows Server 2012 R2
Windows 10 (all supported versions, including server versions)
That’s a massive number of potential targets that could be infected if the patches are not deployed and active monitoring tools are not in place.
Windows XP, Windows Server 2008 and Windows Server 2003 are not affected.
How Does DejaBlue Work?
Like with BlueKeep, the vulnerabilities can be used to exploit RDP, a tool that administrators use to connect to other computers on a network. Hackers could then use that exploit to code and load a worm that is automated. It would “jump” from one computer to another, potentially affecting millions of computers quickly.
What makes the DejaBlue and Bluekeep vulnerabilities so dangerous is that they can propagate without any user interaction.
What’s more dangerous is that the new vulnerabilities differ from BlueKeep, which targeted Windows 7 operating systems. The new exposures could affect Windows 7 and all recent versions of Microsoft’s operating systems. That amplifies both the risk and the potential impact.
“At this point, nearly every contemporary Windows computer needs to patch, before hackers can reverse engineer those fixes for clues that might help create exploits,” notes Wired magazine.
While a British intelligence agency, GCHQ, is credited with identifying BlueKeep, Microsoft notes that it identified the new threats itself. To date, no evidence that exists that indicates the vulnerabilities were known to third parties, the company said.
“These vulnerabilities were discovered by Microsoft during hardening of Remote Desktop Services as part of our continual focus on strengthening the security of our products,” Microsoft said in a release.
The scale of the potential damage is extraordinary. As of July 2019, there were as many as 800,000 computers worldwide that were still vulnerable to BlueKeep, with a much larger potential threat from DejaBlue.
What Can We Do to Protect Against Cybersecurity Threats?
The key to maintaining a secure network is developing a comprehensive, multilayered security strategy. A managed services provider can partner with you to develop a cybersecurity plan that includes:
Comprehensive network perimeter monitoring using next-generation firewalls to detect, contain, disable and destroy threats
Continuous monitoring of systems, endpoints and users
Automated downloading and installation of software and firmware updates, upgrades and patches that respond to emerging threats
Anti-malware, anti-spam and anti-virus software installed on each user’s machine or device, updated automatically, and analyzed to determine potential threats
Email and data encryption
Password security, including multifactor authorization
Mobile device management, including remote location finding, disabling and wiping functions
Cloud solutions for secure hosting of data, apps and operating systems
Business continuity and disaster recovery planning
Employee training
Having the right security in place greatly reduces your risk of being affected by a cyberattack that can debilitate your business, ruin its reputation and cost thousands to repair.
