An IT Support Blog from London

When businesses embark on cyber security initiatives, one of the things that’s often overlooked is DNS security. Many people forget or simply aren’t aware that a compromised DNS infrastructure (or any critical component of that infrastructure) could potentially lead to considerable downtimes, malware outbreaks, data breaches, and several other forms of cyber incidents.

These things can happen because DNS or the Domain Name System plays a crucial role in almost any user-initiated activity that takes place on the Internet. DNS is in charge of resolving the easily-recognisable names like www.somesite.com or ftp.companyx.com that users enter into their web browsers, email clients, or file transfer clients into the IP addresses (e.g. 200.100.10.10) that computers use to communicate with one another.

Although cloud security is often brought up as a major issue in cloud adoption discussions, there still remain a few misconceptions that need to be corrected and clarified. In order for businesses to make the right steps in securing their cloud-based digital assets, they need to distinguish the myths from the facts. This blog post can help in that regard.

These are some of the basic things you need to understand about cloud security.

The prevalence of firewalls and anti-virus software has closed many of the common attack vectors that cyber criminals use to gain unauthorised access to networks and to bypass online security. For this reason, attacks increasingly rely on fooling users into allowing access to systems: legitimate-looking emails that easily clear the common-sense hurdle can hide malware and well-planned hacking attacks.

Even with the necessary protections in place, it is surprisingly easy to “spoof” an address, with a form field that looks correct in every way; except for the fact that the sender is not who it appears to be. Most users will think twice about opening an attachment sent by an unknown sender, but if the attachment appears to be from a colleague the usual caution is sometimes left by the wayside.

Most businesses make use of cloud services to some degree. Whether it is occasionally dipping into a SaaS application when required or relying on cloud based services for all your computing and storage needs, there is almost always some of your private business data stored in the cloud. This raises questions around who holds ultimate control of data, and the storage location of your data. Surveys illustrate the level of concern: the 2017 McAfee State of The Cloud Survey underlines how only 23% of respondents fully trust public cloud providers to keep their data secure.

When managed correctly, a private cloud can be a worthwhile investment for certain businesses. It comes with almost all the benefits of public clouds minus the data privacy concerns. Of course, not everyone can afford a private cloud, especially the kind that’s built on-premise (i.e. not virtual private clouds offered by CSPs). So who should invest in one?

In this post, we look at some major indicators that denote a company’s suitability for a private cloud investment.

Data backups are among the top cyber security countermeasures against ransomware, flood, fire, and other threats to data availability. As long as you have backup copies of your data, your business will have a pretty good chance of recovering from almost any major disaster. But what kind of data backup solution is the best?

It depends on your specific requirements. These days, backup solutions can be grouped into two - online backups and offline backups. Each has its own advantages and disadvantages. Knowing when to select one over the other can help you maximise your financial resources when spending on a backup solution.

Since a comprehensive comparison of these two sets of solutions can be quite long, we’ve decided to focus first on online backups. In this post, we’ll help identify situations when an online backup would be a better fit. But before we do that, let me make sure our definitions of these terms are the same.

Like many software applications these days, Microsoft’s flagship office suite is now being offered as a cloud-based service. User files can be stored on OneDrive, making them available online. There are other online and collaboration features as well. But is Microsoft online Office really a better alternative to the on-premise MS Office we’ve all been used too? What are the possible reasons why Microsoft took this path?

Of all the types of malware wreaking havoc these days, one clearly stands out - Ransomware. This troublesome malware appears to be gaining a lot of fans in the cybercrime community and has, in turn, caused considerable stretches of downtime on a large number of organisations.

It is without question a risky affair: allowing employees to use their personal devices to access your network and valuable, often confidential company data. Yet despite the risks BYOD (bring your own device) marches on and companies and organisations around the world are adopting tactics and technologies to make it work.

Server virtualisation has been a viable IT strategy for some time. Virtualisation has its origins as a technical concept in the 1960s, but it is more recently that the virtualisation of servers has become commonplace, and it is a matter of priority for many IT managers: the 2017 Spiceworks State of IT survey suggests virtualisation is at the top of the list for software investment. The reason for this is simple: by making use of virtual server hosting UK companies are saving on expenditure and seeing the implementation and management of software applications becoming much more flexible.