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You Won’t “LIKE” What Social Media Can Do To Your Business Security and Productivity

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You Won't

More Posting and Less Productivity

Employees using company computers to access their favorite news website, social media page or check the score of their fantasy football team is nothing new. The problem is these sites and apps are getting more addicting every day, and employee productivity is dropping at an alarming rate. Even worse, more and more companies are at risk for employees using company resources to access adult websites and gambling websites as well.

Create a Policy to Protect Productivity

The first step to stopping the loss of valuable work time and productivity among your employees is to establish a policy that details what your employees are allowed to do and not allowed to do with company resources and while on company time. You want to make sure you use content filtering and blocking software to enforce this policy, because the honor system just doesn’t cut it anymore. You want to make sure this software monitors internet using, company email and the blocking of sites and content that you don’t want your employees to access while they are on the clock.

Sneaky Social Use

Another stop you need to take is to establish a policy on the use and internet usage of personal devices that are brought to the office. While everyone has a cell phone, and emergencies do happen. You want to make sure your employees aren’t using their personal devices, such as smart phones and tablets, to access productivity killing apps, websites and social networks. This is even more necessary if you have employees that are on a BYOD or Bring Your Own Device policy for work.

Why Your Company Needs An Internet Use Policy

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Internet PolicyWith computers and Internet access such an integral part of every business, and the Internet filled with everything from gambling to x-rated websites, it is critical that every business has an Internet use policy in place. This policy can help prevent your employees from accidentally or intentionally causing harm to your company or your company’s reputation. While you don’t want to give your employees the idea that they are living in George Orwell’s 1984, you want them to have a clear understanding of practices that are and are not appropriate during work hours. It is necessary for companies to create an Internet policy that everyone can live with.

Why Have An Internet Policy?

The purpose of a business is to make money. In order to accomplish this, the company has to have productive employees. The Internet can be a time drain and often prevent employees from being as productive as they should be. With such a wide range of information available on the Internet, it is necessary to clarify the company’s expectations of its employees regarding Internet access. With a strong policy in place, the employee, as well as the employer, will find Internet use less confusing and frustrating.

Another important reason to have a strong Internet policy is to save your company from unnecessary lawsuits. Unless you have a clear policy on what is and is not acceptable on the Internet in your company, you can risk having an unfair dismissal lawsuit on your hands when an employee is abusing the company’s Internet.

What Elements Should Your Internet Usage Policy Contain?

When planning your Internet use policy, it should contain certain key elements such as:

The company Internet is for company business only and to be used only during company business hours
All work done on company computers during business hours, including all emails, is company property and can be accessed by the employer at any time.
Establish what type of computer use is unacceptable such as accessing personal social media accounts, personal email, pornographic websites, etc.
Employees must refrain from accessing websites, creating, or forwarding email that promotes any type of discrimination such as racial or sexual discrimination, or that is defamatory or harmful towards another person or group.
Employees are not allowed to gain access to or attempt to access other employee’s computers, employee stored information, or any information unauthorized by the company.

In addition to the guidelines above, inform your employees that whatever is done by the company, for the company, and on the company computers should remain confidential and within the confines of the company. In addition, let employees know that when they access unapproved sites, they risk infecting the company computer system with viruses that could possibly shut down the entire company network.

Having an Internet use policy in place helps to eliminate any confusion and possible abuse that could prevent a company from functioning productively. A solid Internet use policy help to make the work environment more pleasant and more conducive to getting the necessary work done in order to have a successful business. Creating a safe and productive environment is important for any business, and one way to ensure that is to implement an Internet use policy.

Are Your Employees Wasting 3 Hours of Productivity?

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Are Your Employees Wasting 3 Hours of Productivity?

Time is Money

In the age of the Internet, instant information, social media, smart phones, tablets and much more, the business world has seen great leaps and strides in the ability to reach an audience, clients and customers, but at what cost? Well, it turns out that cost may come in the form of productivity in the work place, as recent research has shown that a majority of employees with access to the Internet are wasting between 1-3  hours surfing the web or checking their social media. Along with the crunch this can bring to your bottom line, it also has an effect that reaches beyond that. When employees are wasting valuable work hours on the Internet, they are hindering their progress on their own work, slowing the completion of any collaborative efforts on projects and eating up bandwidth and slowing Internet speeds for work related needs.

In order to reduce and eliminate the time wasting temptation of the Internet, businesses should take these suggested steps:

Lock and Key Rules

The first step is implementing software that will help to manage who has access to what websites. This is key in today’s age as many businesses use social media and job posting sites for their own needs. In order to ensure that these sites are being used in a productive manner, you need to ensure the right administrators have access. This means setting up secure access to social media strictly for your internal marketing team, and reserving access to job posting sites for your human resources department. It boils down to a simple rule, “If you don’t belong, move along.”

Check the Numbers

In order to address and correct the problem of unnecessary Internet usage, you need to first know the source of the problem and the extent of the lost time. This requires the installation and monitoring of an Internet activity reporting system. This will allow you to observe what employees are doing while accessing the internet and measure how much of the work day is being lost to useless Internet surfing. The simple implementation of this ability should greatly reduce lost productivity as employees know they are being monitored.

Put Up a Filter and Block

For both productivity, security and legal purposes, be sure to install a filtering system in your company’s network. This is often as simple as the installation of a piece of hardware to filter out and block any specific websites, key words or categories. The keeps employees from accessing websites and content that could contain unprofessional materials and also downloading apps or software that could contain damaging viruses or malware. This proactive process will improve employee efficiency, while also saving your business from costly recovery costs if a virus or malware program gains access to your network.

9 Steps to an Effective Cyber Security Plan

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9 Steps to an Effective Cyber Security Plan

There is not a day that goes by that you do not read in the paper or hear on television that some company has been the victim of Cyber Crime. The alarming thing is that for every incident that you hear about there are probably six more that have happened that you don’t hear about. There are many reasons why people don’t report about breaches. Probably the biggest of which is the damage to their reputation and the cost of properly handling the situation. Ponemon Institute recently reported that each record lost cost the company $201.

Here are 9 Steps to an Effective Cyber Security Plan.

1. End User Education and Awareness. IBM did a recent study that showed that 95% of all data breaches were caused by human error. A company must produce user security policies covering acceptable and secure use of the organization systems. It must also establish a staff training program and maintain user awareness of cyber risk.

2. Develop a Home and Mobile Work Policy. In today’s work from anywhere environment more and more people are communicating and working from home, coffee shops, hotel rooms and anywhere else they have an Internet connection. The company must develop a mobile work policy and train staff to adhere to this policy. The policy must include a baseline for what access a mobile user has to protected data. It must also have security measures and encryption put on devices that have access to protected and sensitive data.

3. Systems Security Patching and Inventory of Assets. Knowing what type of devices are being used is critical in the overall Cyber Security planning. The company must also know what types of software are on all of these devices as well as provide Security Patching for all of this software. Some companies are aware and do the Microsoft portion of this but often fail in the other applications such as Chrome, Java, Flash, Adobe and many other applications that are common on almost every system.

4. Removable Media and Cloud Data Controls. Tens of thousands of records could be copied onto a USB Drive or uploaded into an employee’s personal Dropbox in a matter of minutes. Companies must have a means by which they can secure their sensitive data from being copied onto USB removable media and onto the many Cloud Sync services that are available.

5. Manage and Monitor User Privileges. Establishing the account management processes and limiting the number of privileged accounts is vital in securing the network. Also setting up alerting for when new user accounts are created or permission levels have been changed is essential.

6. Incident Management. Knowing who to contact in the event of a data breach is essential to a timely Data Loss Prevention Policy. Every company must establish an incident response and disaster recovery plan and keep it updated. This plan must be tested quarterly to ensure its viability in the event that it is needed. There also should be special attention given to the changing laws that may or may not affect the policy.

7. Network Monitoring. You can’t manage what you can’t see. The combination between the number of systems in an environment, the incredible fast pace of today’s business world and the multitude of hats that the average business owner wears, makes it impossible to stay on top of changes that are happening in the network. A good Cyber Security monitoring plan would ensure that all of the security patches are being applied to all software, the notification of new software being installed on existing software or being  uninstalled, that the desktop Malware Protection is functioning properly and is up-to-date, as well as monitoring a successful backup and disaster recovery program.

8. Layered Security Plan. Often I meet with clients and their only line of defense is their Desktop Antivirus. In today’s environment that would be like an intruder having breached the gate on the drive, the guard dogs missed them, they then knocked in the front door and are now ramming the bedroom door. And effective policy must have multiple layers such as, Spam Email Filtering, Next Generation Firewall, DNS Security and finally an approved Desktop Security Suite with Antivirus and Malware protection.

9. Yearly Breach Audit by a Professional. Security is one of the fastest changing parts of technology today. In a recent article from Trend Micro they stated that 2016 is going to be the year of extortion. A company must be vigilant in their defense and part of that vigilance is having a professional security expert do a yearly Cyber Security Audit. This will keep Data Loss and Breach in the forefront as well as mitigate liability for the company.

Developing, defining and communicating your Information Risk Management Regime is central to your organization’s overall cyber security strategy. Today’s business environment requires every business to be vigilant in protecting not only their own data but also the data of their clients.

Productivity: Is the Job Really Getting Done?

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Productivity: Is the Job Really Getting Done?

Are Your Employees Too Distracted To Be Productive?

In the age of technology that has come with cell phones, email, instant messaging and social media, it’s easy to see where distractions can become a common occurrence. Nobody wants to be distracted, especially while at work. However, recent research has shown that the common distractions we all face in the workplace may be diminishing productivity and efficiency more than we realize.

Set It and Forget It

Constant emails, questions from colleagues and phone calls can cause you to lose valuable work time. In fact, research from the University of California has shown that the average person may need as much as 30 minutes to refocus on their task after an interruption. Furthermore, research also showed that the average person only gets about 11 minutes of uninterrupted work before a phone call or email comes into play. The effect of frequent interruptions adds up quickly and can result in more than 10 1/2 hours of unproductive work time in a week.

In order to cut down on interruptions and lost work time. The best strategy is to schedule a specific time for these distractions. Set aside a couple of 30 minute blocks in your day specifically for returning phone calls and emails, and set “Got A Minute” time in your day for coworkers to “stop in” your office with questions or concerns. When you set these times, make sure you stick with them and enforce them. Outside of these schedule times, avoid checking your email, let your phone go to voicemail and keep your office door closed! This will greatly reduce lost time and boost both productivity and efficiency on valuable projects that require your attention.

A Simple Way to Increase Employee Productivity

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A Simple Way to Increase Employee Productivity

Don’t Lose Information when You Update.

Everyday it seems like a new technology is hitting the market, and in order to keep up companies are constantly updating to the latest software. While this can be a great way to become more efficient in the workplace, this can also cause employees problems if not properly implemented. One of the largest time wasters for employees is searching or finding information. In order to reduce the time wasting and confusion these services could be applied to increase productivity:

Cloud Storage

The first service that can help employees be more productive is a cloud storage system for the company. Cloud storage will give employees access to share and keep files online without having to search for them in multiple programs. Also one of the best features about cloud storage is it gives employees ways to access their files and document from any device at any time .

This service can come in many shapes and sizes depending on the company’s needs. A few of the well known cloud services are Dropbox, Google Drive, and iCloud. Based on the needs of the employees.

Back-it up

Another way to prevent any wasted time productivity is to make sure they have all of the files backed up regular basis. Having a hard drive fail in a computer can be detrimental to a company and employees. To prevent this and have a piece of mind, make sure you backup your files to an offsite location. Data Backup from Carolina IT Group gives you continuous protection of your company’s critical data with no effort on your part, so your business will remain protected even if your main server were to crash.

Organize email inbox

Email can be your best friend or worst nightmare when it comes to productivity. On average Forbes states most employees receive 121 emails a day. If employees are scrounging to find specific emails that were sent a week ago a lot of time is wasted. One of the best ways to organize emails is by either client or project or topics. Adding folders and filtering to your email can also cut down on time lost searching.

Not Monitoring Internet Usage Could Be Risky Business

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Not Monitoring Internet Usage Could Be Risky Business

A Big Part of Your Business Can Cause Big Problems

The internet and email are tools we use in business so fluently we can’t imagine the world without them. However, more and more businesses are discovering that these tools are being used by employees for activities that aren’t business related. Employers are quickly discovering that unmonitored internet use by employees is severely hampering productivity and can even result in serious legal consequences.

In order to reduce or even eliminate these risks, there are two key approaches every business must take. The first is to establish a detailed Internet Acceptable Use Policy or IAUP to set clear guidelines for employees on what is and is not appropriate use of email and the internet. The second step is the installation of a monitoring system for your business network that ensures employees are operating under the IAUP guidelines.

When establishing your IAUP, you want to be sure you specifically outline prohibited uses, rules for online behavior, access privileges and penalties for violations of the company policy that include consequences for security violations and vandalism of the system.

Common Flaws Found in IAUPs

  • Instant Messaging – While instant messaging services are a quick and easy way to communicate within the office, you must be cautious about what you’re sending. A majority of IM services don’t provide adequate security measures for confidential data and information.
  • Social Media – As the popularity of social media continues to grow, so does the risk of confidential company and client information being leaked to it. You don’t want to see the latest company gossip or scandal spreading across Facebook like wildfire.
  • Websites – Strictly prohibit employees visiting websites that contain pornography, racism, sexism, gambling or emailing any of this content. Even if the intention is innocent, the consequences won’t be.
  • Downloading – Put a strict halt to all downloading when it comes to music, video, programs and apps. These downloads could easily contain viruses that will quickly put your data at risk and result in a costly cleanup.

Contact Info

740 Greenville Blvd. SE., Ste. 400-374
Greenville, NC 27858

Phone: (252) 565-1235