SMART Blog

There are plenty of risks that today’s businesses regularly deal with, particularly in terms of cybersecurity. This year, a panel of experts shared some human risk management insights at the Cybsafe Impact 2024 USA conference. Let’s review some of the topics they touched on.

A business experiencing a network bottleneck is having a bad day, especially since the ability to share data is so important to many industries today. That said, today’s resource-intensive technologies can easily eat through an organization’s bandwidth and create these kinds of network slowdowns.

Let’s talk about what can be done to reduce these bottlenecks, if not eliminate them outright.

Moving is already difficult, but when you factor in your business’ IT, it becomes twice as frustrating and time-consuming. You can make it easier by preparing for the job ahead of time. Today, we want to cover what you can do to prepare for a business IT move well ahead of the scheduled date.

It’s natural for businesses to rely on their tools, like IT, to achieve success, but if you don’t take care of your systems, it could lead to downtime. You can bypass many of these challenges with the right approach to technology maintenance. We want to highlight some of the proactive methods you can use to keep downtime to a minimum.

Let me ask you something: would you trust a bank that locked its doors for the night but left all its cash in a big pile in the middle of the floor? Probably not—after all, if someone managed to get through the doors, nothing would stop them from helping themselves to the funds inside.

This is effectively how cybersecurity once worked, with the presumption that if someone had access to a network, they had permission to access any data on it. Fortunately, many businesses have made the switch to a better approach, known as zero-trust security.

It isn’t rare for people to subscribe to things and only stay subscribed because the cancellation process is so challenging and inconvenient. However, the Federal Trade Commission is looking to stop this, adopting a rule that eliminates the capability for businesses to put hurdles in front of cancellation processes.

There’s never been a more dangerous time to run a business. Okay, maybe that’s not necessarily true, but hear me out. With digital technology taking on a greater importance for businesses than ever before, companies have to contend with countless threats—including the ever-popular phishing scams—regardless of their geographical location.

A well-structured framework is essential for establishing effective, consistent policies and strategies. This applies to many areas—including network security. Today, we’re diving into the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) cybersecurity framework, which outlines steps to help safeguard your business.

Spoiler alert: a business that lacks productivity is unlikely to see any amount of success. One of the best ways to ensure your productivity is to practice patience. How can patience improve your productivity?

How seriously does your business take data privacy? Can you back up your answer with concrete examples of what you do to prioritize that notion? Today, we face a serious threat to both individual and consumer data privacy, so we want to take the time to cover how you can make data privacy a priority in your own life.

Sometimes problem solving requires you to step away and think about the issue at hand. Consider any great strategist out there and you’ll understand that it takes time and calculation to make moves that will benefit you now and in the future. Today, we’ll explore how you can be more productive through strategic pausing.

If you or your business are worried about cybersecurity, we’d like to say, “Congratulations, you get it!” Too many people fail to take cybersecurity seriously, and with hackers and data breaches making headlines worldwide, you cannot underestimate them. Today, we want to cover how a cybersecurity consultant can save you time, money, and stress over your security systems.

Cybersecurity is one of the most talked about problems facing the modern business. This is because cybercrime has increased precipitously while businesses have moved more of their processes onto the computer. Planning how to protect your business’ crucial digital resources from corruption and theft has never been more important. We’ll take a look at some of the problems we are seeing that are negatively affecting small and medium-sized businesses' ability to do business effectively.

Spring seems to be the natural time, after what are commonly dreary winter months, to revitalize and refresh your environment - why shouldn’t your business be included? Not only does it help your operations, a clean environment also has many direct benefits for your employees. Let’s review the effects of keeping your business, and its technology, in order.

Insider threats contribute to a significant number of data breaches. These cases of data exposure are enabled by a member of your staff, whether they intended to harm your business or simply made an honest mistake. With so much focus directed toward the threats out in the world, sometimes we forget that the biggest dangers can be among our ranks. To make up for this, we’ll discuss a few ways to keep insider threats from doing your business too much harm.

Mistakes happen, especially where technology is involved. There are plenty of ways that user error can occur when using a computer--many of which are avoidable through simple preventative measures. For our tip this week, we’ll go over some behaviors to avoid when using a computer.

Each worker within an organization is delegated some sort of responsibility based on their role. Managers are responsible for managing, while human resources keep all workers accountable for their responsibilities. Yet, there are multiple responsibilities designated to all employees who use technology for their everyday duties.

With the surge in the number of small and medium businesses that have fallen prey to malware and cyber criminals, there is a lot of focus of what an organization can do to prevent being a victim and how the company should handle themselves after an attack. There is another key factor to preventing cyber criminals from penetrating into your network: your employees.

Here’s something that you might not have noticed about opening Windows applications on your desktop; by default, they will generally open in a smaller window, giving you the ability to customize their size as you see fit. If you want a full size Window, it’s as easy as clicking on the maximize button in the top-right corner, but what if you didn’t want to go through this every time you open the app? There’s a solution for this, and we’ll help you find it.

Here’s a question: on a scale of one to ten, how confident are you that your employees are acting in the best interests of your organization’s network security? How confident are you that you’re setting a good example when it comes to handling your business’ security? Unfortunately, any confidence you have on this matter may be misplaced.