What is your Security Posture?

You've watched the news reports of businesses being hacked and sensitive information being compromised. You know you don't want to be in that position, but what do you do? To understand your business's security posture, you must start with these questions:

1. What is your biggest security concern and is your security spend and expertise properly allocated to address that risk?

2. Do you have a clear picture of your overall security posture and of how it relates to industry best practices?

3. Do you currently conduct security assessments, such as penetration tests on a bi-annual basis?

4. How realistic is your plan to address the security gaps that you might have today?

5. Do you have an established process to address computer security breaches?

6. How confident are you in your ability to demonstrate compliance?

7. Given the skills gap that exists in security, do you view the ability to recruit and retain talent and expertise as a top priority?
   

To learn how we can help you address these concerns, reach out today. We can help you evaluate your business priorities, business risk, and identify your most valuable assets.

Stop DDoS Attacks

Two things keeping business owners up at night : Their competition and hackers

Tactically, addressing competition is much easier. Hackers, however, are like sharks in the water. From the surface they aren't visible, but you know they're there, waiting for their opportunity to strike.

What is a DDoS attack?

A distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack is when an attacker, or attackers, attempt to make it impossible for a service to be delivered. This can be achieved by thwarting access to virtually anything: servers, devices, services, networks, applications, and even specific transactions within applications. In a DoS attack, it's one system that is sending the malicious data or requests; a DDoS attack comes from multiple systems.

Generally, these attacks work by drowning a system with requests for data. This could be sending a web server so many requests to serve a page that it crashes under the demand, or it could be a database being hit with a high volume of queries. The result is available internet bandwidth, CPU, and RAM capacity becomes overwhelmed.

There are three primary classes of DDoS attacks:

1. Volume-based attacks use massive amounts of bogus traffic to overwhelm a resource such as a website or a server. They include ICMP, UDP, and spoofed-packet flood attacks. The size of a volume-based attack is measured in bits per second (bps).

2. Protocol or network-layer DDoS attacks send large numbers of packets to targeted network infrastructures and infrastructure management tools. These protocol attacks include SYN floods and Smurf DDoS, among others, and their size is measured in packets per second (PPS).

3. Application-layer attacks are conducted by flooding applications with maliciously crafted requests. The size of application-layer attacks is measured in requests per second (RPS).

For each type of attack, the goal is always the same: Make online resources sluggish or completely unresponsive.

New technology now analyzes both inbound AND outbound traffic and can easily be layered over your existing network.

If you aren't willing to be the victim of an attack and would like more information, we can set up an in-depth call to discuss your security. 

Contact us today to take a 13 question Cybersecurity Test to determine your risks.

Nextiva Offers HIPAA-Compliant Voice, Fax and Video

Nextiva is the first cloud communication company to offer a HIPPA-compliant suite of products. .

We are now able to offer HIPAA-compliant voice, fax, and video conferencing with Nextiva's Business Phone Service. 

HIPAA Business Phone Service

Nextiva offers HIPAA-compliant business phone service that is used and trusted by some of the biggest brands in healthcare. Their call security and reliability has been vetted to be HIPAA-compliant and comes backed by a Business Associate Agreement (BAA). 

HIPAA vFAX

HIPAA vFax can be purchased as part of a business phone service package. Just like with standard vFAX, the HIPAA vFAX service will be unlimited when included with a voice plan. Nextiva has the security controls in place to provide secure and reliable service to healthcare companies of all kinds.

HIPAA Video

Amazon Chime’s video conferencing and online meetings platform is HIPAA compliant and comes free with any Enterprise plan. Nextiva’s partnership with Amazon Chime makes them the only provider to offer a HIPAA-compliant voice, fax, and video conferencing solution.

Download the HIPAA Compliance Guide for the complete list of available features.

If you want to look at voice improvement options for your business please give us a shout.

Moving Your Business? What You Need to Know

Many clients sign a lease without realizing the effects this can have on their telecom spend, and the services they will need to support their business.

Before moving, consider the following:

1. Find Services

We have access to fiber maps, showing which telco carriers reside or are close to the property you may be interested in.

2. Determine Termination Fees

Not all carriers can simply move your services without charging ETF's (early termination fees), to see what this would equate to or not equate to, engage us.

3. What Carriers are Available?

Your existing or preferred carrier, service and product of choice may not be available where you are looking. Loop us in early and we can provide you with this information to make an educated decision.

4. Determine Pricing

Depending on who the underlying carrier is, costs will vary. A great price or the same price isn't always guaranteed when moving. Let us assess to provide an accurate cost summary.

5. Are There Construction Costs?

Construction costs may be associated, even in areas where services are available. Make sure you know going in what that could look like.

6. What is the Time frame?

Time frames to install service can go past 120 days. Make sure you are looking at your options well in advance.

7. Disconnect Old Services

Don't forget to cancel your services after your new services are up and running. We DO NOT cancel services for you, however, we can guide you on how to do so.

If you are considering moving, engage give us a shout. We can provide you with the proper paperwork and help coordinate your move. Moving telecom is a major hassle, we can help.

Covid 19 & Remote Worker Enablement

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As a business Leader, here is what you need to know.

Work at home declarations from the CDC and other government agencies may become the new normal. Not only could it become a temporary law, but it's also the best way to protect your employees from exposure to the novel virus. So how can you as a business owner prepare to transition your workforce into a work-at-home team that still performs at a high level? We've created a step-by-step process to help you prepare.

1. HIGH-SPEED INTERNET

   The first thing you need to do as a business owner is to survey your employees to see what kind of broadband they are using at home. To run business voice and video calls, they're going to need plenty of throughputs. A good standard that should provide enough horsepower is 50 Mb down, 5 Mb upload speed.

2. MOVE YOUR PHONE SYSTEM TO THE CLOUD

   Here are the key features of UCaaS that will enable your work-at-home employees by leveraging the benefits of unified communications in the Cloud: Video Conferencing, Mobile App Collaboration, and CRM Integration.

3. MOVE DESKTOP WORKSPACE TO THE CLOUD

   With Active Directory, you can ensure certain file-sharing rules within your own Local Area Network. Two promising technologies address these features and move them all to the Cloud while maintaining centralized control over access permissions. Workspace as a Service and Desktop as a Service

4. MOVE CONTACT CENTER TO THE CLOUD

   Does your business have a contact center or help desk in-office? Having a Cloud Contact Center solution allows your employees to support your clients while working from home.

5. IDENTIFY & PROVIDE NECESSARY DEVICES

   Don't let Coronavirus hold your company back; make sure that your employees have the technology they need: Mobile or softphone Desktop or laptop computer

6. REMOTE FILE SHARE

   When you send your workers home, they must be able to share, collaborate on, and store files in the Cloud. The most popular cloud file storage providers are: Microsoft Office 365, OneDrive, Google G-Suite, Google Drive, Dropbox, and Box.com

HOW FAST CAN YOU MAKE THE PIVOT? If you'd like assistance in putting a work-at-home technology plan in place, contact us, and we'll get you in touch with our trusted advisers.

Don't Abandon Customer Service

"Speak to a representative, please." "Speak to a representative!" "REPRESENTATIVE!"

Sound familiar? There is nothing more frustrating than having this type of phone interaction with voice-activated software when trying to get a real human on the line to resolve a customer service issue. It's not fun for the customer, and it could be lethal to the company in question if a critical mass of its clients gets fed up with the experience and defect to a competitor.

Customer-service quality has always been a hot-button topic for consumers and businesses alike, as the above phone example demonstrates. But today's stakes run even higher in a digital world where the tools and options to engage have mushroomed, customer preferences have grown, and giants like Apple and Amazon have reinvented how companies deal with consumers, ushering in a new standard of sorts.

Today, 89% of companies in the overall economy say they now compete primarily on the basis of customer experience they provide, not necessarily the products they sell. It's a new competitive advantage. Fewer customers today are determining their loyalty to a provider or brand based on product and/or price. Buyer empowerment now rules the day. As a result, it is the quality of the customer experience (CX), or the perception of that quality, that often sways whether clients stick with or ditch a brand.

Contact us today to learn how we can take your brand to the next level.

Get Control of Your Mobile Strategy

According to Enterprise Mobility, 91% of enterprise IT decision makers say their companies support BYOD programs. The phone number a customer uses to call your business is important. There's a relationship attached to it, if that phone number is an employee's personal line, then you give up some control over the customer relationship.

Interested in solving this problem? Ask yourself these seven questions to see if you need help with your mobile strategy.

1. How do you enable workforce mobility?

2. Do you have a formal BYOD strategy in place?

3. What financial pressures does your mobility strategy create?

4. Do your employees conduct business using their personal phones?

5. What happens when those employees leave the company?

6. How do you comply with regulatory requirements like recording?

7. How do you see your infrastructure evolving?

We have vendors who can help solve this problem. You can get a company-owned number for official business voice and text added to employees' personal smartphones. Employees can now manage their business and personal communications on their preferred device. Contact us today to see how we can help.

What is your Security Posture?

You've watched the news reports of businesses being hacked and sensitive information being compromised. You know you don't want to be in that position, but what do you do? To understand your business's security posture, you must start with these questions:

1. What is your biggest security concern and is your security spend and expertise properly allocated to address that risk?

2. Do you have a clear picture of your overall security posture and of how it relates to industry best practices?

3. Do you currently conduct security assessments, such as penetration tests on a bi-annual basis?

4. How realistic is your plan to address the security gaps that you might have today?

5. Do you have an established process to address computer security breaches?

6. How confident are you of your ability to demonstrate compliance?

7. Given the skills gap that exists in security, do you view the ability to recruit and retain talent and expertise as a top priority?

To learn how we can help you address these concerns, reach out today. We can help you evaluate your business priorities, business risk, and identify your most valuable assets.

Hosted Contact Center - Demystified!

You've heard all the buzz words - IVR, ACD, CRM - and more. But how do you know what to look for in a hosted contact center solution? We understand the alphabet soup can be overwhelming. Let us help make sense of narrowing down the process. Here are the top five things to look for: 

1. Service Reliability & Uptime - No other metric is as important as reliability. If your contact center is down for even a minute, you're losing lots of money every minute. Your contact center service provider of choice should have at least 99.99 percent reliability. Unlike on-premise solutions, contact center solutions are geographically redundant to improve dependability.  

2. Ease of Use, Admin Portal Access, Dashboard Simplicity - The best features in the world are useless if the agent ends up writing everything down on a piece of scrap paper. Make sure the complex features of your potential contact center software are still easy enough to learn and use.  

3. Provides a 360 Degree View of Your Customer - Your contact center solutions need to pull information about a customer from several sources and put that information in front of the agent, so the agent can better serve the customer. Knowing the customer's past actions and present concerns will help predict their future needs.  

4. Customer Self Service Features and Automated Tasks - Let your agent do the important stuff, but the boring tasks can be done for you. A good contact center Solution will make the most of your agent's time.  

5. Security Measures - In today's age of identity theft and leaked emails, you need the proper amount of encryption to keep your data safe. In addition, all financial and medical communications/data are tightly regulated. Be sure that your customers will feel safe giving private information to your agents.  

Want more help with the alphabet soup? Call us today.