New Year, New Me, Enhanced IT

Welcome to 2023! It’s time to enhance your IT.

Do you do New Year’s resolutions for yourself? How about for your business? Traditionally, business owners plan for the new year’s potential growth and how to hit their increased revenue targets. As part of that process, annual budgets are also drafted to help forecast expected/unexpected expenses. One thing that may be overlooked is how enhancing your IT environment will greatly benefit and assist in your business growth.

But what exactly does “enhance your IT” mean? I’m here to give you some ideas on what that could entail for you.

1. MFA

You’ve probably read this acronym countless times and may not fully understand what it means. It stands for Multi-Factor Authentication and can be a life saver in a pinch! It’s basically a security measure that will verify that it’s really you who is trying to access your account. The way it works is that when you’re trying to log in to an account, instead of only entering your password, a unique code is also sent to your registered phone number or email address. Once you enter this code, you’ll be able to access your account. It may take an extra couple of seconds, but this is nothing compared to the information that could be potentially stolen if your account is accessed by malicious hackers.

*Pro Tip* You may think this only applies to your business accounts, but more and more social media accounts are getting hacked as well. At this point, there is virtually almost nothing you can do to recover your account as it is extremely difficult to get in touch with support. I’ve seen this happen to countless users on Instagram and the hacker will pose as the user and pretend to be posting as normal – when in fact they are stealing information from within the account. Don’t let this happen to you! Be sure to set up the MFA option in your account settings.

2. Phishing Training

What in the world is phishing anyway? John does a good job of breaking it down here. But for technical novices (like myself), it’s the modern-day scam delivered right to your email inbox. Great, another thing to worry about. Well, that doesn’t necessarily have to be the case if you have regular training for your employees. Training will show them how to quickly identify a phishing email and reduces the risk of falling victim to a phishing scam.

3. Phishing Simulations

This goes hand in hand with phishing training. It’s the extra step you can take to ensure that you and your employees are ready to take on any attempted phishing attacks. A phishing simulation is essentially a fake email sent by your trusted IT partner to everyone in your organization. The fake email will look exactly like how a phishing email would look. Your IT partner will be able to track who opens the email and how they interact with it (i.e., if they click links, input sensitive information, etc.) It’s a great tool to see if you and your employees are truly prepared for these modern-day scams.

If you’re ready to enhance your IT, please reach us at (915) 587-7902.