Ransomware Targets Businesses of All Sizes

,

Ransomware has been all over the news recently. If a company as large as Equifax can fall victim to a ransomware attack, you can be sure small businesses are at risk. No organization – no matter its size – is immune to attack.

Why Would I Be a Target?

Many business owners mistakenly think their companies are too small to be a target for hackers. In fact, smaller businesses with little-to-no internal IT staff are likely a much greater risk as they often can’t afford or don’t know about information security solutions, best practices and protocols used by larger companies. Hackers target small businesses for just this reason.

Ransomware hackers aren’t so much interested in your information as they are in getting paid. That’s why the average ransom is usually below $2,000. They depend on companies without the adequate resources to defend or recover from a ransomware attack to pay to decrypt their files.

Ransomware Attacks: What Happens?

Ransomware attacks often are successful because an employee clicks a link or downloads a file in a legitimate-looking email that then immediately begins encrypting all your files. For example, human resources may receive a phishing email titled “Resume” with an infected attachment. After downloading and opening the document, the hidden ransomware will begin encrypting files, and a message will usually pop up demanding a ransom be paid in Bitcoin to receive a decryption key from the hacker. Considering that most hackers aren’t ethical, there’s always the possibility that they may not provide you with a key to decrypt your files after you’ve paid the ransom – causing you to lose access to all your data.

Ransomware Attacks: What Should I Do?

If you fall victim to a ransomware attack, you should immediately disconnect your workstation from the network and shut it down to prevent other workstations and your backups from becoming infected and encrypted as well.

If you’ve partnered with a security-conscious managed services provider (MSP), you should call them so they can begin to perform forensics on your systems. They will look for the source of the attack and the vulnerabilities the hackers were able to take advantage of to access your network and files.

If you have working backups that aren’t encrypted, you can easily restore your systems to a state prior to the attack. If you don’t have backups and your information isn’t decrypted, you may have lost your information forever or be forced to recreate it.

You should continue to work with your MSP to implement additional cybersecurity solutions, conduct cybersecurity awareness training for your employees and consistently use information security best practices.

Finally, you should report the incident to the police and the FBI’s Internet Crime Complaint Center.

How Can I Prevent Becoming a Victim?

We believe in a layered approach to security. You can’t just have antivirus software. You also need advanced endpoint security, consistent system patching and so much more. Plus, you need working backups to restore your data if all else fails.

Cybersecurity awareness training is also key to maintaining a secure organization. Your employees need to be able to identify possible risks and avoid them. Your employees are often your best defense – and your weakest link.

Outsourcing your information technology to a managed services provider like Simpleworks IT can take much of the cybersecurity worry off your hands. Improve your ability to defend against cyberattacks by working with an MSP with experience and expertise in cyber security including back-up and disaster recovery, cloud solutions and more.

With expertise in back-up and disaster recovery, Simpleworks IT can help defend your business against cybersecurity threats and IT challenges. Find out why we’re Colorado Springs’ leading managed IT provider. Contact us at 719-476-0444.

New Customer Portal Designed For You!

,

At Simpleworks, we recognize the need for our customers to have access to as many of our support services as possible. To address this need, our recently redesigned website has an advanced computer services customer portal that features customization options, communication tools, and useful information. We are already receiving great feedback about the added capabilities of our new site, especially the customer portal, so we’re confident that this improved access will benefit your company as well.

Advanced Features of the Simpleworks Customer Portal

The new portal is more than just a bill pay system. Here are some of the features of the Simpleworks customer portal:

  • Ticket submission — After logging in to the secure account area, our customers can submit a support ticket directly to our IT staff and monitor its progress.
  • Ticket templates — Many issues are common and general, so we’ve provided quick submission templates to make your submission even faster.
  • Account controls — Customers can review their plan, pay their bill, and download invoices from the Simpleworks customer portal.
  • Informational links — The portal also features links to important information about services, IT issues, and more.
  • Emergency contact — For our customers who face an IT emergency after normal business hours, submitting a ticket on the Simpleworks customer portal is the best way to contact our support staff.

Meeting the Needs of Our Customers

At Simpleworks, we continually strive to find new ways of meeting our customers’ demands. IT systems are vital to most businesses in the modern marketplace, so you can’t trust your success to a subpar IT service and support company in Colorado Springs.

Simpleworks has a proven record of providing superior IT customer service to a wide range of clients—both commercial and residential—in southern Colorado. Give us a call today to see how we can help your business to implement the IT solutions that will keep you operational, efficient, and protected.

Is Hybrid Managed Service the Right IT Solution for Your Small Business?

, ,

Not every company has an IT infrastructure and budget large enough to justify full managed services of their environment. And some companies are only looking for a little help in supporting their environment. Nevertheless, nearly all companies rely on their IT to keep business operations productive and profitable. Simpleworks understands that small businesses require operational IT, but may not have the budget or need for a dedicated IT support staff. The solution is our hybrid managed service package.

Our Hybrid Managed Service

Our Hybrid Managed Service package gives you many of the benefits of having full-time IT support without the overhead. We will provide the following automated services:

  • Patching
  • Identification of old or problematic patches
  • Antivirus protection
  • Proactive monitoring
  • Automatic remediation and repair of common problems

In addition to these services, hybrid managed service clients will have access to our support ticket service, which operates 24 hours a day. Our support staff can diagnose any IT-related issue and give you an estimate for service.

Why Simpleworks?

Simpleworks is southern Colorado’s leading IT and managed services provider. Our IT professionals regularly work with business owners who need customized services based on their needs and budget. Give us a call or email us today to find out more about our managed service packages and how we can help you to remove the stress of unexpected IT issues.

Unified VOIP Communications and You

,

Clear the Way to Your Business with Unified Communications

Communication solutions have one basic function: removing obstacles between you and your customers. A basic technology like the telephone allows people to communicate without having to be face to face, removing the obstacle of distance. Today, though, there are many different ways that people communicate (phone, instant messaging, voicemail, eFax, email, etc.); the various systems and devices used to deliver these communications can become an obstacle.

A unified communications system is vital to ensure easy and open communication between customers, employees, and vendors. Thanks to advances in cloud computing, data delivery, and software, the barriers between you and your customers can be removed.

Phone and Data Services

Business owners who want to improve their communication capabilities have a number of different voice and data services available. Many of these services utilize the Voice over IP (VoIP), which is platform that uses Internet Protocol (IP) to deliver phone calls and other media. VoIP business solutions are the preferred platform for many companies today and can also be paired with data services to give your business a truly unified communication system.

Magnavoip

– For small to medium-sized businesses, Data102’s Magnavoip is our preferred hosted handset  solution for small and medium-sized businesses. Magnavoip provides class 5 features like voicemail, eFax, hold queues, and more.

Microsoft Lync

– The most feature-rich phone and data services platform available today, Microsoft Lync connects you and your customers through VoIP, video conferencing, instant messaging, shared whiteboards, remote screen management, and more.

Cisco Call Manager Express

– This VoIP solution has many of the same features as Microsoft Lync but is better suited for larger businesses with up to 250 employees.

Each of these unified communication solutions will allow you to connect with your customers more efficiently, improving your customer service and reputation, which will ultimately affect your bottom line.

Colorado Springs Voice Solutions

Simpleworks is Colorado Springs’ leading IT and voice solutions company. Our IT support staff specializes in state-of-the-art voice and unified communication systems to serve businesses of all sizes. Contact us today to see what voice and data services will work best for you and your customers.

Do You Have a Disaster Recovery Plan?

, ,

Most business owners wouldn’t imagine operating without an insurance policy to cover break-ins, accidents, fires, and other unforeseeable disasters. But many businesses fail to appreciate the need to insure their precious online property—their data.

A catastrophic loss of data can not only disrupt normal business operations; it can actually have an adverse effect on your bottom line, customer service, and reputation. Even if you have solid IT infrastructure and services in place, data loss can happen for any number of reasons. You need a disaster recovery plan in place in case of an emergency. Simpleworks can help.

Colorado Springs Data Disaster Recovery Solutions

With BDR backups, Simpleworks offers a comprehensive disaster recovery service. Here are some of the features:

  • Hybrid cloud backups. The physical BDR device will back up your data automatically as frequently as every 5 minutes and can be easily retrieved. In addition to the physical copy, your data can be backed up off-site on a secured BDR server. This level of redundancy issues that none of your data will ever be permanently lost.
  • Instant virtualization. Your backup data can be virtualized almost instantaneously from either the physical device or the cloud to replicate the failing server. This will keep your business operating while the problem is addressed.
  • Backup Insights.  This service allows us to locate and retrieve deleted files that occur between backups. This kind of retrieval can be invaluable for small scale data loss from misclicks or carelessness.

BDR backup services are also encrypted and comply with current HIPPA standards.

Colorado Springs Data Recovery

At Simpleworks, we have heard a lot of horror stories about catastrophic data loss. As Colorado Springs’ leading IT support and disaster recovery solution, we utilize BDR backups to ensure the safety of our customers’ vital data. This disaster recovery plan provides the protection and redundancy that your business needs.

Don’t put your business at risk. Insure your data with BDR backups from Simpleworks today.

Too Much Spam? Simpleworks Can Help!

Spam has been an unavoidable nuisance as long as there has been email. It’s not hard to see why: spammers can send out millions of emails for free. Even if only 1 person in 1,000 buys the product, spam is generating hundreds or even thousands of additional sales.

As email clients have matured, they’ve gotten better at detecting spam and discarding it before it clutters your inbox. Despite the advances, spammers are constantly finding new ways of working their ads into unsuspecting email accounts. Many times these emails are soliciting scams or contain links that can automatically download nasty viruses that can seriously damage your computer and those in your contact list. Spam is not completely unavoidable, though. Simpleworks offers spam solutions that work!

Getting Rid of Spam with DirectMX

DirectMX is one of the best spam solutions on the market today. DirectMX is an email filtering solution that protects your computer or network from receiving—or even sending—spam. It uses heuristics (complex algorithms and principles) to filter incoming emails. These various metrics generate a spam score that is compared to a table to determine if the incoming email is spam or not. DirectMX can be set to either quarantine or reject the incoming spam.

It’s also important to make sure that your network is not sending spam. We’ve all gotten odd emails from people we know that just contain a strange, anonymous link. DirectMX can monitor sent emails to ensure that email accounts in the network have not been hijacked. If email clients in your network are continually sending spam, the server reputation will be affected, which could cause your regular outgoing mail to be rejected by other email clients. Of course, the best way to ensure you’re clients aren’t spamming their contact list is by blocking the virus spam before it ever gets in.

Spam Solutions that Work from Simpleworks

Simpleworks is southern Colorado’s leading IT support company. We specialize in setting up networks with DirectMX. Even if you don’t have hosted email service with us, we can protect you with the power of DirectMX. Give us a call today if you are being relentlessly spammed and hacked! You don’t have to live with the aggravation and lost productivity.

Do I Need the Fastest Internet Possible for My Business?

,

The Internet is certainly faster today than ever before. If you were around during the early days of dial-up, you probably remember waiting minutes for a single web page to load. But today, even our smartphones generally connect to the Internet and download content almost instantaneously. Speed has come to be expected.

Because of this, many business owners feel that they need the fastest Internet speed possible to serve their customers and employees. While fast Internet speed for business is needed generally for some tasks, quality can be just as, if not more, important for others.

Quality vs. Quantity

There are basically two classes of Internet service: “best effort” and “enterprise.” “Best effort” services are what you probably have in your home: Comcast, CenturyLink, or some other cable or DSL provider. These Internet services can be quite fast, but their speed depends on how many users are on a trunkline at a given time. While delivering a faster speed at times, they are not completely reliable.

But speed isn’t everything. “Enterprise” class services are higher quality Internet solutions, meaning they are much more reliable. The low latency guaranteed by enterprise Internet solutions is vital for online phone services like Voice over IP (VoIP), site-to-site tunnels (connections between multiple locations in a given area), and connections to a corporate office. While the fastest Internet connection possible is ideal for web browsing and email, a reliable, low-latency service is much better for a business’s vital communication channels.

Colorado Springs Internet Solutions from Simpleworks

The IT professionals at Simpleworks in Colorado Springs work with each business individually to implement a cost-effective Internet solution to address its specific needs. Our Colorado Springs Internet solutions are usually a hybrid of a regular cable service—like Comcast—and a T1 line for redundancy and quality. This ensures that your day-to-day operations run smoothly and that your essential communication channels and data are never compromised. Give us a call today to see what solution would work best for your needs.

 

Business Communication Problems Could Be Costing You Money

, , ,

If your business is like most, you can’t function without your phones. But it’s not just phone service that you need: voicemail, transferring, eFax, hold queues, and other features may be necessary for you to conduct business efficiently and productively. Then there’s the cost of these features to consider. Thanks to advances in digital technology, you have a range of different business communication solutions to fit your needs, your size, and your budget.

Common Business Phone Problems

Phone problems can be debilitating and costly. But it’s not only the loss of service that’s problematic—unreliable voicemail, malfunctioning hold queues, or connectivity issues could all be trying your customers’ patience and reducing your revenue. In addition, your internal communication could be suffering as more and more employees work remotely or travel for business. Plus, the phone service you have now could be costing you more than it needs to. And the actual hardware you’re using may be failing or out-of-date.

Business Communication Solutions

The technology available today has more features and reliability than ever before. Your communication system begins with the hardware: handsets, headsets, conference phones, mobile devices, etc. Then there are a number of different unified communication solutions to fit your needs and budget:

  • Hosted PBX: A simple, cost-efficient solution for small businesses with less than 50 users. We will install the system on a virtual private server (VPS), which can be managed by your internal IT team or Simpleworks.
  • Magnavoip: Our preferred hosted handset solution. Magnavoip is a feature-rich, cost-effective service for up to 500 users.
  • Voice over IP (VoIP) with Cisco Call Manager Express: A great solution for business with 250 users or less. Cisco’s VoIP system is affordable, customizable, scalable, and simple.
  • Microsoft Lync: The most comprehensive unified communication system on the market. Microsoft Lync is VoIP enabled and also provides instant messaging, video calling, screen sharing, and much more. It is cutting edge, versatile, and dependable.

Simpleworks Has You Covered

Simpleworks, a communication solution company, specializes in fixing communication problems so you can focus on your customers, not troubleshooting technical issues. We sell, install, and manage phone systems as well as unified communications services like VoIP, Magnavoip, and Microsoft Link. Give your local Colorado Springs IT and communication support team a call, and we’ll find a solution that fits your needs and your budget.

 

Simpleworks Keeps You Going with Emergency IT Support

, ,

Nearly every business today relies heavily on information technology. Computers, Internet service, servers, phone systems, email, data storage, and calendars are all necessary for most businesses, large or small. We generally don’t realize how much we rely on our IT, in fact, until something goes wrong. But a disruption to any IT system can mean a serious hit to productivity, and even lost profits. Unfortunately, no matter how many precautions are put into place, IT systems will malfunction from time to time. These disruptions strike without warning at any time, day or night.

Simpleworks understands how vital it is that companies stay up and running, which is why we offer a 24/7 IT support service. Whether you have a system-wide crash on a large network or trouble with an individual computer, we have an IT specialist standing by to assist.

Superior 24/7 IT Support

Simpleworks offers a wide range of troubleshooting and repair services 24 hours a day. We have expertise with both Macs and Windows-based PCs, hardware and software issues, as well as connectivity and communications problems.

Beyond their expertise, our Colorado Springs computer support team is efficient, friendly, and professional. We understand how vital it is to keep our clients’ IT systems fully functional, so we tackle every problem as if it was our own—promptly and efficiently. This dedication to the needs of our customers is why we are the most trusted IT support company in Colorado Springs.

How Our 24/7 IT Support Service Works

All you need to do is submit a ticket to our 24/7 computer support team at support@simpleworksit.com or through our automated phone system. You will then receive a response within one hour. Our technician will diagnose the problem and may be able to assist remotely. If not, we will come to you. If you are a larger company, you may want to set up a contract with us that includes 24/7 computer support. If not, we offer an hourly rate to cover your specific emergency.

Don’t Let Your IT Down!

Don’t spin your wheels trying to troubleshoot a problem yourself or let your IT problems lead to a loss of productivity or profits. Give the pros at Simpleworks a call today so we can get your back up and running!

 

VoIP and Voice: What You Need to Know

, , ,

VoIP stands for Voice over Internet Protocol. Essentially what it does is convert audio phone signals that are normally broadcast in analog format to digital data, which can then be sent over the Internet. What this means is that businesses can use their Internet connection to make free phone calls. Since long-distance and international calls can be cripplingly expensive with standard phone service, a VoIP and Voice solution can save a business a lot of money and help them reach out to a larger global market without cutting too deeply into their budget.

Some companies may be skeptical about using VoIP, however, afraid that calls may be unclear or frequently dropped. The truth is, though, you are probably already using VoIP whenever you make long distance phone calls; more and more phone companies are using this protocol to reduce bandwidth and streamline their network. In fact, according to a study done by Juniper Research, one billion people will be using VoIP by 2017 and all the leading VoIP carriers are “becoming increasingly sophisticated in their service offerings.”

Here is how the system works. A business phone provider will install an Internet connection via Ethernet cable, which guarantees fast Internet speeds and better performance. This prevents calls from being dropped or losing sound quality. Next, a voice service is enabled by the business phone provider using routing technology so that calls can be placed cheaply (or free, in some cases)—both across the country and around the world. Most providers can actually use a company’s existing phone connection in order to set up the VoIP system. Any headsets and microphones needed are usually included in the provider’s installation services if the company does not already have them or want to purchase them separately.

Once the system is installed, businesses are able to access a wide range of call solutions including:

  • two- and three-way call waiting
  • direct inward dial
  • call transfers
  • hold music
  • attaching messages to emails
  • listening to voicemails over the Internet.

Despite all of these benefits, VoIP services are viable and reasonably priced, making them an asset to any company, large or small.

VoIP and Voice solutions might sound complicated on the surface, but they are actually incredibly user-friendly resources and provide a wide range of useful services. In today’s competitive market, the ability to communicate effectively with clients—without paying a fortune—can give a business the edge it needs to get ahead. Don’t get left behind. Let Simpleworks help you to set up your VoIP system today.