Information technology blog, cybersecurity blog

In case you haven’t heard, October is National Cybersecurity Awareness Month! Perhaps you’ve already checked out some tips and best practices to help keep you more secure. If you haven’t, not to worry as we have you covered with a roundup of tips and resources from our experts. If you have, you might find additional valuable cybersecurity awareness info below!

I recently had the chance to help Reader’s Digest update an article titled “11 Things IT Professionals Don’t Want You To Know”. It’s no secret that IT is a little misunderstood. Part of our mission at Kelser is to connect IT strategy to the overall business strategy of our clients. When integrated into the company as a whole, IT can be a major business enabler, helping achieve goals across the business. It starts with viewing IT as more than fixing things when they break.

Technology plays an increasingly crucial role in organizations of all sizes and industries. That’s one reason why 89 percent of companies expect their IT budgets to grow or stay the same in the next year. However, when times get tough and businesses need to cut corners, the IT department is often among the first targets for cost reduction.

It seems like large-scale data breaches that expose thousands upon millions of records are regrettably becoming commonplace today. Protecting your personal and business data should be a priority for anyone that has ever entered information into a web form. Without taking proper steps to secure your data like login credentials, you could make yourself vulnerable to anything from phishing attacks to full account takeover (or even worse). Even a single breach can cost a business upwards of $2.3 million per attack (not to mention the costs related to things like the damage to your reputation) and personal accounts risk losing personal finances, priceless memories (like photos and videos), and more. One of the most basic ways to improve cybersecurity is to make sure you're following best practices for your passwords.

It’s nearly 2019, and what it takes for CIOs and other technology executives to be successful looks a lot different than it did as recently as say, 2014. Recently, I was quoted by two major technology news outlets about the role of technology executives in the success of their organizations:

It can be scary out there in the digital world. It seems like not a week goes by where we don’t hear about phishing emails, unpatched vulnerabilities, or the latest strain of ransomware exposing the data of millions of people and businesses to the prying eyes of malicious actors. Every person and every business are potential targets with some of the largest companies in the world susceptible to the same vulnerabilities as the average Joe at their home computer (phishing being a prime example).  But all is not lost as October is National Cybersecurity Awareness Month! What better time to review your cybersecurity practices, discover where you can make improvements, and seize the chance to make positive change? Consider it a fall “spring cleaning” for your digital life and business.

Trust can be a precarious thing. One mistake could ruin it forever. You spend so much time and energy building trust with your customers, vendors, contractors, and partners, that the last thing you want to do is lose it, particularly over non-compliance. Believe it or not, record keeping and data handling is critical to maintaining that trust.

A revolution is upon us. For the first time in the history of computers, the speed of storage has caught up with the rate of the computing resources that use that storage. Up until this moment, storage has always been the bottleneck. Although your computer can store some information in its primary memory, known as RAM, this storage has a physical limit. Past that limit, you'll need to read data from a secondary storage device such as a hard disk, which is a much slower process. If you've ever tried to copy a file from an external device onto your computer, for example, you'll notice that it takes much more time than opening a file that's already stored in your computer's memory.