An IT Support Blog from London

Unless you’re on G Suite, chances are that your company’s staff uses Office 365 apps such as Word, Excel, and Outlook on a daily basis. Office 365 remains the go-to cloud service simply because most office workers are accustomed to Microsoft’s long-standing productivity suite.

Though Office 365 packs in plenty of functions, there is also a wide range of productivity plug-ins that can help you get even more out of your everyday Office apps. We list seven top examples below, and chances are that at least one of these apps will make your working day just that bit more productive.

Few can dispute the importance of data in the success of any enterprise. As we enter a data-driven environment in the modern workplace, data has become a key factor in practically every aspect of business operations, including manufacturing and production, sales and marketing, human resources, and the decision making of business leaders.

We know that remote working is increasingly becoming the norm. A 2019 survey by IWG found that more than 50% of employees around the world are working off-site for more than 2.5 days in any given week. However, the scale of remote working we’re seeing right now is unprecedented – government-imposed lock-down is pushing businesses to adopt remote working like never before.

One could argue that most companies are reasonably well prepared for remote working and will by consequence have the right security measures in place. While that is true for many companies, other organisations might find the sudden and involuntary push to remote working a bit of a shock and will rightly be concerned about the security implications.

In this article, we cover key remote working security tips for those companies which are suddenly adopting remote working. Even if your organisation has embraced remote working in the past, consider reviewing the tips below to make sure your security practices are watertight.

IT outsourcing often wins the debate between in-house IT or outsourcing technology requirements to an IT support company, businesses commonly opt for the latter because outsourcing reduces costs, draws in more expertise, and allows businesses to focus on core competencies.

Sometimes, however, companies decide to take IT back in-house or do not consider outsourcing. A few horror stories or a bad outsourcing experience can often sour the mood around outsourced IT. Like a lot of things in business and technology, getting the most out of IT outsourcing – and avoiding the horror stories – just involves a degree of awareness and the right steps.

When evaluating cybersecurity risk, we tend to focus on technological factors: patches and upgrades, vulnerabilities, attack vectors, and so forth. Yes – technology solutions are vulnerable, and cybersecurity breaches are usually facilitated by advanced hacking technology.

However, the perpetrators behind cyber-attacks are human. These human actors have human motivations: greed, or a political agenda. Furthermore, cyberattacks often rely on human weaknesses – socially engineered cyberattacks, for example.

Data breaches can be very costly. Costs can include the usual financial consequences such as response and remediation, customer breach notification, litigation expenses, and regulatory fines, but can also include less obvious consequences such as the cost of business disruptions, loss of customer trust, and higher insurance premiums.

Clearly, it’s imperative for businesses to find ways to avoid a data breach, and here is how it can be done.

In the current digital economy, data is the new oil, so an organisation can’t have too much of it. Today’s company executives are turning to data when making crucial business decisions in sales/marketing, operations, human resources, and just about every aspect of the enterprise.

More data is becoming available in large volumes and from various sources, but turning plain data into actual usable information—i.e. facts, trends, and statistical numbers, can be a complicated and tedious process. So, businesses have a choice. They could continue to acquire whatever data they can, then simply leave out what they can’t store, or they could invest in data warehouse technologies to process data faster and get the right information more quickly.

Technology is central to your business, but your business may not necessarily be in the business of technology. That’s why you rely on an IT support company to conduct the day to day maintenance of the tech that supports your business.

Over time, however, there may come a need for a change in support providers. Your business may grow, presenting increasingly complex technology needs that your existing supplier cannot cope with. Or, your support company may simply drop the ball too frequently.

What are the signs that your company should consider switching, and how should you go about making this switch? Read on to find out!

An organisation’s primary and immediate line of defense against malware is typically the antivirus software installed in each of their users’ endpoint devices. It works in the background, checks data being received for known malware signatures, and warns users of possible threats. Antivirus software does contribute greatly to an organisation’s online security, but it is not enough to mitigate all malware threats when you consider how advanced these threats have become.

A rapidly growing pool of productivity data is aggregated by Microsoft thanks to the broad adoption of cloud productivity suites. Indeed, Office 365 is leading the field with triple the market share of its closest competitor, G Suite.

Office 365 and the Azure cloud platform is therefore a rich source of information detailing how employees conduct their daily work routine, and this has led Microsoft to launch Workplace Analytics. But who gets access to Workplace Analytics, and can it provide real insights for your business?