It is easy to follow the mistaken belief that beefing up security at your business involves buying expensive hardware and software or hiring a top-rated security consultant to step in and make major changes. In fact, it is possible to make solid security progress by simply following good practice, and by tightening protection where needed.

Making these essential improvements is important for businesses of all sizes. In 2016, the Federation of Small Businesses found that the UK’s small businesses are collectively attacked over 7 million times a year, costing up to £5.26 billion. In this article, we cover some of the most effective ways to improve resilience against these attacks without spending an arm and a leg.

The challenges of actively managing information security are growing, and every business, regardless of size, should pro-actively protect their systems and the data held within. But how do customers know that your information security practices are fit for purpose?

Even the best intentions do not guarantee sound security practices for businesses. The only way for customers to judge the internal processes of your business is by checking for accreditation such as ISO 27001. In fact, 71% of respondents to a 2016 survey by IT Governance Ltd said that they had fielded a question about ISO 27001 accreditation.

HTL Support is delighted to announce that it will be exhibiting at The Business Show, London, on May 16th and 17th.

Our professional and friendly team is looking forward to welcoming visitors, and learning about the areas in which they most need IT support, as well as demonstrating the latest software solutions that can provide a competitive edge to businesses throughout London. Find our stand at exhibitor number 110.

DDoS attacks are typically designed to inundate servers and entire networks by consuming computing resources through large volumes of traffic, connections, or requests. And so, because cloud infrastructures are assumed to be backed by a large assemblage of such resources, many people believe their servers are less susceptible to these types of attacks if they’re hosted in the cloud. But that’s not entirely true.

If your servers are hosted in a multitenant environment along with a bunch of other servers belonging to other organisations (which is usually the case in a public cloud), your servers could be at risk of collateral damage. If those other servers (note: not yours) are bombarded by a DDoS attack and your cloud service provider (CSP) attempts to absorb the attack, your own servers, which share the same underlying infrastructure with those other servers, could also suffer.

Only two months left before GDPR is implemented any eligible organisation not following the regulations could suffer colossal penalties, as much as four percent of the company's annual turnover or 20,000,000 Euro’s whichever is the Greater!

Does GDPR applies to you?

Only half of UK businesses are even aware of GDPR, whilst a solitary three percent are prepared for the upcoming Cut-off date. Many large organisations such as eBay, Yahoo and Adobe have had data breaches. Therefore many companies assume that the new regulations only apply to companies dealing with personal data -unfortunately this is not the case!

HTL Support's Business Briefing event on 23 February was a resounding success and offered delegates real insight into the EU General Data Protection Regulation legislation and its likely effects on the IT sector. Demand for the event was far in excess of available places and is an indication of just how relevant the impact of GDPR is to anyone working in IT.

There is one area on which everyone concentrates when it comes to getting the most out of an IT budget: squeezing the supplier. Though getting commodity items at the best prices and achieving the most value out of the services and IT support costs you pay for is important, there are many other areas where careful consideration can result in far more optimal IT spending.

Deloitte’s 2016-2017 CIO survey found that, on average across all industries, expenditure on IT packages, staff, and services accounts for 3.28% of a company’s turnover, with businesses in professional services industries commonly managing annual IT budgets of 6% of overall turnover. The importance of optimal spending is clearly very high. Here we outline a few of the top areas we think your business should focus on.

Let’s say you’ve already invested a fortune on network security. How do you determine that investment’s effectiveness in preventing a data leak or withstanding a deliberate cyber attack? Your best option would be to conduct a penetration test or pen test.

The reliability of the IT organisation plays a critical role in every enterprise, given how the use of technology has deeply entrenched itself into every business organisation. From being more of back office tools a few decades ago, IT systems are now front and center in many enterprises’ business activities.

With IT contributing significantly to customer-facing applications, analytics services, and even creating new revenue streams for the enterprise, it’s important for the IT group to maintains its operational and cost efficiency. One way to ensure that the IT network competently responds to business needs while keeping within budgets is to implement IT infrastructure standardisation.

Do we keep our IT services in-house, or do we outsource IT responsibilities? That is the question many management teams ask themselves when they look at the benefits of managed IT services. Outsourcing IT services save costs, introduces new knowledge and helps businesses focus. However fully outsourcing IT functions is not the best route for every organisation, and there are pros and cons to each approach. But how about opting for a mixed model?