Top 4 Ways to use Technology to Reach Your 2018 Business Goals

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2018 is almost here! Automated Business Solutions is here to provide you with some tips to make sure your office’s technology helps you reach your goals. Here are a few ideas:

 

1. Use productivity apps to help you meet your personal goals in the office

One of my favorite productivity apps is Forest by SeekrTech. If you’re anything like me, you may easily be distracted by your phone. When it isn’t productive for you to be using your smartphone, use Forest. With Forest, you can set a timer for how long you need to remain focused on a task outside of your smartphone. If you keep Forest open until the timer runs out you will earn credits and plant a virtual tree. These credits are exchanged to plant real trees in the world. Forest accomplishes this in partnership Trees for the Future. Using Forest makes your productivity time charitable, and rewards you for staying focused. Forest is available for iOS, Android, and now has a Chrome webapp and Firefox addon. You can find out more about Forest at the website at https://www.forestapp.cc/en/

Mindfulness meditation has proven to boost productivity and focus in the workplace and its practice is often a New Year’s resolution of its own. Headspace and Calm. are apps designed to assist with practice of mindfulness. Headspace now comes with business plans and is used by companies like Linkedin, Airbnb, Google, and Spotify. Each app walks you through guided meditations designed to relieve stress, anxiety, and to improve positivity, focus, and energy. Although each comes with a free trial, both require paid addons or subscriptions in order to continually progress with the app.

Calm.
Headspace

If you don’t have a personal goal yet (we won’t tell anyone) there is an app help you find vision and ease to attain it. The TED app gives you access to thousands of videos of TED talks on almost every topic. Speakers offer inspiring and visionary ideas in your area of expertise. If you need motivation, start with the TED app to set your 2018 skyrocketing.

TED app

When using your phone as a productivity tool, use the Outlook app to access your calendar, set reminders, access email from your smartphone. The Outlook app integrates with Office365 so your Outlook webapp, Outlook desktop application, and phone application will always be in sync. Just sign in with your company’s Office365 account and get moving!

Outlook for iOS

 

2. Check your backups

When backups are initially set up they don’t operate under the policy of ‘set it and forget it’! Although your managed services provider may be getting positive backup reports they may not know that you want a new drive backed up, or that the new laptop that came in holds mission critical data. Take the time to think through where some of the most important information is being saved and have your managed services provider check to make sure those areas have backups, If its only a few files that are the most critical such as a Quickbooks file, Barracuda MSP backup may be the best solution for you, if it’s the whole network, ask about our Barracuda Backup appliances, that keep a local copy of your backups on the network and uploads to the cloud to provide high reliability and efficiency in your backups, ABS covers both solutions in our MaxxD plans. Hard drive failures don’t happen often, but when they do, give yourself the peace of mind that you have a backup.

Barracuda Backup Appliance

3. Have your network evaluated for efficiency and security

Your office may be less secure than you think. Hackers and malware creators use phishing methods that, without a careful eye can deceive some of the most vigilant technology users. It’s good to have powerful antivirus on your network to combat viruses and malware but it is better to prevent malware from landing on your network. Using tools such as a Dell Sonicwall firewall or a Barracuda Essentials Email security filter can reduce the risk of malware by more than half.

Sonicwall
Barracuda Essentials

 

4. Have toner replacements ready to go

If you’re looking for greater efficiency from your office in 2018, there is nothing more frustrating than having that efficiency interrupted by a stalled printer, this can leave a whole department down until  that printer is serviced or until toner arrives. You can prevent that from happening by keeping backup toner on hand or if you have a supplies contract sign up to use a tool like FMAudit to make sure your printing supplier is aware when your toner is starting to run low or if a maintenance kit is close to expiring, That way replacements will arrive before you run out.

 

Canon Toner

 

 

 

We hope you can reach every goal you set this coming year.

From all of us at ABS have a Happy New Year!

Encryption: A positive tool, in the right hands

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Encryption, We hear the term used often. Some associate it with security and protection. Others with breaches and destruction. It is at the heart of many new problems, solutions, and innovations. But what is encryption? And why can it be seen as either a good or bad thing?

Encryption is the process of converting readable data into unreadable data, only to be made readable again if decrypted with the proper decryption key. It was created to secure the transfers of sensitive data, and has its roots dating back to the enigma machines of World War II (pictured in featured image), cracked by the English computer scientist and mathematician Alan Turing. Today encryption is used to protect sensitive data such as banking information, medical records transmissions, and critical business data. But is Encryption a very secure process? And how is it done?

In a nutshell encryption scrambles up data and saves it. The only way the data can be unscrambled is if the user has a decryption key or algorithm to unscramble or decrypt the data. To demonstrate I created a small Python program with a very basic encryption algorithm to demonstrate: click here to learn more.

There are many positive ways encryption can be used. The AES encryption standard is used by the U.S. Government and many business such as Automated Business Solutions MaxxD cloud backup Services. It prevents outsiders from prying in on your personal data. This is especially effective when your data is saved on a space such as the cloud.

But there are some ways encryption can be used negatively. In the case where data is encrypted without access from the proper user such as in ransomware. Ransomware can infiltrate a computer or network through methods such as email phishing, or insecure sites.  Once it infects a system it can encrypt data away from the proper user. By doing this, the virus creator can hold data ransom from a user, withholding the encryption key until a certain amount of money is sent usually via Bitcoin. The best way to secure your network from this type of malicious use of encryption would be through Automated Business Solutions MaxxP protection services, which is powered by Barracuda email filters that prevent phishing scams from ever reaching your network, And MaxxM monitoring services that provide Bitdefender Antivirus and patching services that can provide immunity from a cyber-attack via ransomware.

The last area where we see encryption technology is an area such as Bitcoin, in this area, rather than securing data from other users or accounts, the publicity of the data becomes the security of it. When transactions occur with bitcoin, an encrypted key is assigned to the owner of the coins, only the owner of the coins can decrypt them to their public key to use for transactions.

In conclusion, encryption is a powerful technology. The best way for our networks to survive in an encrypted world is to use the technology effectively.

A Closer Look at Encryption

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I created this basic encryption program that converts a line of text into their ordinal numbers (i.e. A=97, space= 32) then runs a mathematical function on the numbers to scramble the data. In this simple example the program adds 2 to each of the ordinal numbers.

Write what you would like to encrypt: a b c d

[‘a’, ‘ ‘, ‘b’, ‘ ‘, ‘c’, ‘ ‘, ‘d’]

 

This is the unencrypted ordinal numbers

[97, 32, 98, 32, 99, 32, 100]

 

This is the encrypted ordinal numbers

[99, 34, 100, 34, 101, 34, 102]

 

This is the encrypted data

[‘c’, ‘”‘, ‘d’, ‘”‘, ‘e’, ‘”‘, ‘f’]

 

In this case it is very easy to see how the algorithm works, abcd became cdef  and instead of spaces, they were replaced with quotation marks. So this would be an easy encryption algorithm to break. Let’s see how it works with a complete sentence:

 

Write what you would like to encrypt: The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog

[‘T’, ‘h’, ‘e’, ‘ ‘, ‘q’, ‘u’, ‘i’, ‘c’, ‘k’, ‘ ‘, ‘b’, ‘r’, ‘o’, ‘w’, ‘n’, ‘ ‘, ‘f’, ‘o’, ‘x’, ‘ ‘, ‘j’, ‘u’, ‘m’, ‘p’, ‘s’, ‘ ‘, ‘o’, ‘v’, ‘e’, ‘r’, ‘ ‘, ‘t’, ‘h’, ‘e’, ‘ ‘, ‘l’, ‘a’, ‘z’, ‘y’, ‘ ‘, ‘d’, ‘o’, ‘g’]

 

This is the unencrypted ordinal numbers

[84, 104, 101, 32, 113, 117, 105, 99, 107, 32, 98, 114, 111, 119, 110, 32, 102, 111, 120, 32, 106, 117, 109, 112, 115, 32, 111, 118, 101, 114, 32, 116, 104, 101, 32, 108, 97, 122, 121, 32, 100, 111, 103]

 

This is the encrypted ordinal numbers

[86, 106, 103, 34, 115, 119, 107, 101, 109, 34, 100, 116, 113, 121, 112, 34, 104, 113, 122, 34, 108, 119, 111, 114, 117, 34, 113, 120, 103, 116, 34, 118, 106, 103, 34, 110, 99, 124, 123, 34, 102, 113, 105]

 

This is the encrypted data

[‘V’, ‘j’, ‘g’, ‘”‘, ‘s’, ‘w’, ‘k’, ‘e’, ‘m’, ‘”‘, ‘d’, ‘t’, ‘q’, ‘y’, ‘p’, ‘”‘, ‘h’, ‘q’, ‘z’, ‘”‘, ‘l’, ‘w’, ‘o’, ‘r’, ‘u’, ‘”‘, ‘q’, ‘x’, ‘g’, ‘t’, ‘”‘, ‘v’, ‘j’, ‘g’, ‘”‘, ‘n’, ‘c’, ‘|’, ‘{‘, ‘”‘, ‘f’, ‘q’, ‘i’]

 

As we can see, even an algorithm this simple can make the data unreadable, “The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog” became “Vjg”swkem”dtqyp”hqz”lworu”qxgt”vjg”nc|{“fql” . All it takes to decrypt this data would be to run it through a decryption program that subtracts two from each ordinal number and outputs the numbers back to letters.

Encryption becomes more secure as the function that scrambles the data gets more complex. There are standards of encryption which are often defined by a bitrate. The bitrate defines the amount of bits that the decryption key uses. The most common form of encryption is AES, it is trusted as the standard by the U.S. government. It ciphers data at 128-bits, 192-bits, or 256-bits. AES Encryption is used in Automated Business Solutions MaxxD backup Solutions powered by Barracuda.