Information technology blog, cybersecurity blog

It's a security-focused world these days. Many of us are still working remotely — if not full time, at least partially — and this opens up a lot of new avenues for malfeasance from the hacker community. As a senior systems engineer, I understand the vital importance of properly balancing security with productivity. If you talk to our security engineers they would say they prefer a locked-down, zero-access policy, but that's not going to work in a real-world scenario.

We’ve all been there...you cleared your calendar to tackle that major project and your computer isn’t cooperating. The deadline is looming. You fill out a help ticket and come to that age-old question...is your ticket “urgent” or “critical?” Most of us don’t like to hit the “panic button.” We don’t want to send out false alarms, but we also want things fixed quickly. 

When you think about cybersecurity, what is the first thing that comes to mind? Passwords? 

Remote collaboration is more important now than it has ever been. Businesses are searching out and identifying the best ways to empower their employees to stay connected from wherever they’re working. Microsoft Teams aims to meet that need by offering a single productivity and collaboration platform that allows you to video message or make/schedule video conference calls, instant message, file share, and collaborate on file editing in real time. You can check out my previous article on Microsoft Teams for more information about its capabilities and ways it could potentially benefit your organization. As an IT managed service provider (MSP) in Connecticut, we’ve seen an increased interest in Teams both internally and with our clients which is why I wanted to show you around the Microsoft Teams interface. Whether you’re just starting to use Teams or want to see what the interface is like before you consider it, this video and article below will show you what you or your end users would see as well as a quick run through of the tabs and features in the product.

With so many businesses operating fully remotely, the ability to collaborate in the cloud has become essential. Hybrid cloud solutions give companies the flexibility to use the cloud in a way that best suits them. TechTarget recently interviewed me about how Amazon Web Services (AWS) fits into the hybrid cloud landscape. Thus far, AWS has not made a play to be a leader in hybrid cloud. But could that be part of a bigger strategy for the cloud computing giant?

As I’ve been working remotely for the past several weeks, I started thinking about all the different software that’s replaced our typical office interactions. The conference room has been replaced by video conferencing software like Zoom. Popping over the cubicle wall to talk has now become instant messaging like Slack. Email and phone are basically the same – especially if you have a soft phone or VoIP capability. File sharing and collaboration is also, depending on what you had setup previously, mostly the same with software like Dropbox or your traditional file servers accessed through a VPN. But what all this software doesn’t replace is the platform to have all these interactions happen and interact with one another. Previously that was the office itself.