Coleman Technologies Blog

IT Security

Let’s start with IT security because it’s undeniably important if you want to maintain not just IT regulatory compliance, but business on your own terms. IT security, like the act of complying with regulations, is an act of risk mitigation. In the case of IT security, the risks are many and complex. You have the risk of operational issues like downtime. You have the risk of system corruption from hackers and other outside entities who are trying to break through (or in) and get access to your assets. There is also internal risk to physical systems, central computing infrastructure, and every endpoint on the network.  

In IT security, the amount of risk often dictates what kind of action is necessary, since reacting to the problems themselves isn’t a viable option. Thus, when protecting your network from threats, you will likely have to be much more comprehensive about your attention to detail as you would even under the most strictest compliance standards.

IT Compliance

Compliance also is all about minimizing risk, but to stay compliant, it’s more about focusing on following set-in-stone rules than it is about keeping systems secure. Most of the regulations that have been passed down by a government entity, third-party security framework, or customer contract have very specific requirements. This gives network administrators a punch-list of tasks that need to happen to keep their organization’s IT compliant with their various IT mandates. 

Insofar as it works to maintain digital asset security, many regulations are created to ensure that risky behavior is not introduced, while others are very specific about what data needs to be protected, and what systems need protection. In fact, some regulations barely touch the IT infrastructure, only dictating that the business purchase regulation-compliant hardware. 

Where Your Company Stands

Compliance standards typically depend on which vertical market your business does business in, or more specifically, how it uses sensitive information in the course of doing business. That doesn’t speak to your organization’s complete IT security strategy. In order to keep all of your digital (and physical) assets secure, there needs to be a dedicated plan to do it. After all, today the user is the most common breach point. 

With that truth it is important for the business that operates under the watchful eyes of a regulatory body to understand that you may be compliant, but still be at risk. It’s important that aside from meeting all the compliance standards set forth by your industry’s regulatory mandates, you need to put together a cybersecurity strategy that prioritizes the ongoing training of your endpoint operators. 

At Coleman Technologies, our technicians are experts in modern compliance standards and cybersecurity. Our team can work to simultaneously build an IT infrastructure, the policies to govern that infrastructure, and the endpoint monitoring and protection solution that will keep your business secure from threats, while also being compliant to any mandated regulations your business is under. Call us today at (604) 513-9428 to learn more.

Manufacturers have long been at the forefront of technology. Today, this trend continues, but with new, innovative tools that are designed to make business more efficient and workers more productive. This technology has helped much of the manufacturing sector despite costs continually rising, supply chain interruptions, and other variables. Let’s take a look at some of the major technology changes that have fueled manufacturers during the past few years. 

Enhanced Digitalization

Manufacturers typically take materials and turn them into consumer goods or components for other manufacturers to use in their process. Many manufacturers have begun the process of digitization; meaning that they now are using digital systems to manage their business, interact with customers, and handle all the automation that has been tabbed to make their process more efficient. Most manufacturers have been using digital technology for quite some time, but some of the shifts that make these changes innovative include the leveraging of robots to do collaborative tasks.

Cobots

Artificial intelligence fuels this trend by using machines that are colloquially called “cobots”. Over 40% of manufacturers use robots and with smarter software the “cobots” can work alongside human workers rather than outright replacing them. This means these robots are much more affordable than traditional robots that typically replace human workers.

IoT

Another digital evolution for manufacturers comes from the Internet of Things. These sensors may not be built specifically for manufacturers, but they hold considerable value for them. The biggest benefit comes in the manner of predictive maintenance. Sensors can keep track of components and maintenance schedules, which can cut down on maintenance costs by a whopping 25 percent. If you consider that downtime can cost tens of thousands of dollars an hour, the more you can do to keep systems functioning as intended the better your business will be. 

Machine Vision

Another use of AI in manufacturing is called machine vision. It lets companies automate their quality control processes on each end of their business. Basically, it allows a manufacturer to run their operations faster than they would if they relied on humans to run point over their quality control. With machine vision detection, manufacturers can increase production and maintain a level of quality they expect from their process, a win-win for any manufacturer. 

Technology can help any type of business, but if you’re a manufacturer that could benefit from innovative new digital tools, reach out to the IT experts at Coleman Technologies at (604) 513-9428 today.

Business Communications

With so much relying today on shared information and collaboration, the capability to communicate internally and externally is something that any business needs to have. Small businesses especially have greater access to the tools that can provide this capability, such as: 

• VoIP – A Voice over Internet Protocol solution is a great way for a business to acquire comprehensive phone services and features for a much more sustainable cost that the traditional means of telephone services.
• Messaging – Messaging can take many forms, from email to instant messages, and plays a vital role in keeping a business in touch with its various internal parts and with other entities outside of it.
• Cloud collaboration – Cloud technology can provide a variety of business utilities, including the collaborative benefits of sharing documents and cooperatively working on them in real-time.

Productivity

Most businesses would rank the ability to produce more in less time as their ultimate goal, making solutions that facilitate this extremely useful for them to adopt. If this is one of your priorities, consider the following:

• Cloud storage and applications – This benefit of the cloud allows your employees to access the documents, data, and other cloud-based tools from anywhere they can access the Internet, freeing them to be productive as they operate remotely.
• Remote access – If you have elected to maintain an on-site infrastructure, remote access tools can give your employees remote access to the hardware they need to stay productive. 
• Automation – Rather than relying on your employees to handle each step of your processes, automation enables your employees to focus on those aspects that require the human touch, while rote steps are handled much more efficiently by your solutions. As a result, more can be accomplished in less time.

Security

We’ve mentioned the operational aspects of how technology can assist your business, but perhaps one of the biggest benefits is how helpful IT can be in protecting your business from various threats. Here is just a small sample of what can be accomplished:

• Access management – Both your infrastructure and the data it holds are valuable, so the fact that the right IT solutions can prevent unauthorized parties from accessing either is a big benefit to any size of business’ continuity.
• Password management – While best practices dictate that users have a different password to protect each account, this advice is often undermined by the number of accounts that modern users have. Using a password management solution can help prevent this from impacting your business.
• Firewall and antivirus – While your users need to be able to spot potential threats, it is advisable that you support them by implementing firewall and antivirus to prevent most threats from reaching them at all.

Remember, this has just been a brief list. Coleman Technologies can help you put technology into place to help you overcome a great many more of your challenges. To learn more, call us at (604) 513-9428 today!

Real-Time Analysis

It’s been said that knowledge is the best weapon. For the small and medium-sized business looking to navigate this situation, this couldn’t ring more true. To be able to make the best financial and operational decisions possible, SMBs are turning to data analysis, in real time. By being able to look at the data that is coming in and going out in real time, a decision maker can swiftly make educated decisions. This can help businesses stay afloat in times where they are at their most vulnerable.

When decision makers can get insights as they happen, they can take action quicker. Additionally, many of today’s most dynamic analytics platforms can be deployed near the edge of their company’s computing infrastructure, meaning that data coming represents the flow of information in and out of a business. 

Some other benefits include:

• Managing location data - Helps decision makers determine the relevant data for multiple locations.
• Anomaly detection - Quickly detects outlying data sets to avoid impulsive decision making. 
• Improved marketing - With a lot of the information coming in, decision makers can make decisions based on demand when it otherwise wouldn’t be noticed.

Online Sales

Many businesses feature ecommerce platforms already, but since all non-essential store locations are closed as lawmakers try to stymie the spread of the Novel Coronavirus, businesses are quickly ramping up their online sales capabilities. In fact, in the retail sector, some businesses are now seeing two-to-three times the amount of online orders than they would typically. It may not be the same as it was when foot traffic was allowed, but by having a strong online sales platform in place, businesses can stay in operation until the stay-at-home orders are lifted, and they are allowed to resume business as usual.

VoIP

It seems that Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) phone systems are the single most useful tool during this entire situation. VoIP provides businesses with strong and reliable telephone systems, with options that you would expect out of an enterprise phone system, for a fraction of the cost of what a business would normally pay for a comparable system from a telecom. 

Additionally, VoIP has a lot of optional features that a business can add when remote work is necessary. Solutions like instant messaging, text messaging, and audio and video conferencing can be major benefits for the remote workforce. Many businesses have taken advantage of their VoIP system’s more dynamic features during the stay-at-home period to ensure that communication and productivity isn’t stymied. 

Automate

Cutting costs during an economic downturn is an art form. Many businesses looked at their pre-coronavirus operations as efficient until they were forced to embrace a digital workforce and cut additional line-items from their budgets. If there is one element that will help any business streamline their operations it is finding ways to deploy automated tools. 

For the business that is looking to enhance their automated processes, they will first need to identify which of them they can effectively automate. These typically include:

• Tasks that involve moving information around
• Frequent and mundane, but necessary tasks
• Tasks that frequently interrupt focus on business critical tasks

Investing in ways to automate tasks like these can go a long way toward streamlining your operations now when it’s most necessary. Best yet, these automated processes will be in place when business returns to some semblance of normalcy.

This is an unprecedented time for the small business, and we would like to help see you through it. Call us today at (604) 513-9428 to find out more how we can help you streamline your business processes.

Making the Most of What You Have

As states have mandated that businesses either close or move operations offsite for the well-being of their employees and clients, many people seem to have been caught off-guard by the duration of these orders. As a result, many businesses have since shifted from a “shut down and wait it out” strategy to trying to do whatever they can—which, for many, is implementing a remote workforce.

Regardless of whether a business tried to cobble together remote operations at the onset or later on, there are still a lot of issues that they will need to contend with. Paying the bills, setting everyone up with the solutions needed to work, and maintaining productivity are all necessary to consider.

Some businesses took the route of laying off their workforce as shutdowns began as they put their businesses on pause and were then provided a lifeline in the form of the paycheck protection program. This subsidy enabled them to keep at least some of their team working and employed. A major tool that helped to accomplish this for many was automation, as this helps to keep your finances fluid.

Automation helps businesses spend their time more productively, fulfilling tasks like payroll processing, managing operations, and invoicing. This not only helps save time, but also money, mainly because these common tasks are commonly outsourced. Of course, other business needs like collaboration, supply chain management, and project management can also be benefitted by leveraging automation.

Security Amidst Security

Cybersecurity is another critical business need that has been largely pushed to the back burner. There has actually been a decline in cybersecurity spending, despite an upwards trend in business being conducted online. Small businesses actually cut their cybersecurity budgets when revenues began to disappear. The cybersecurity industry has been growing at a rate of approximately five percent each year for the past eight years. This year? A little over one percent.

If you’re currently depending on a remote workforce, you want to give them every opportunity to experience success. This is true of most. Most organizations, while they are reducing their overall cybersecurity budget, are still investing in endpoint and intrusion protection. This shows us that, despite the uncertainty of the future, they are still reducing organizational risk by securing their network endpoints.

Of course, you shouldn’t rely on automation to eliminate cyberthreats. Despite IT solutions now heavily featuring artificial intelligence to identify threats, many attacks now rely on phishing attempts. These only become more dangerous when your employees are working remotely, and even more so on their personal devices. As a result, you need to ensure your team is aware of the phishing attempts that will be directed against them. This will require ongoing training in updated best practices, if only to prevent a major malware attack from infiltrating your network.

One way or another, businesses will almost certainly have a larger focus on remote operations moving forward. For assistance with the solutions and strategies that will keep your processes progressing from here on, reach out to the IT experts at Coleman Technologies today. Give us a call at (604) 513-9428.

Business can get messy, particularly when variables outside your control are involved, which could spell doom for your organization. We’re talking, of course, about instances where your organization might be under a particularly large threat—instances where your data is at risk, which could jeopardize your future. Thankfully, there are options to mitigate this risk.

You Cannot Control Natural Disasters, but You Can Control These Factors

The big consideration for protecting against data loss in an uncontrollable disaster is to think ahead. You must implement proactive measures if you want to protect your data as it needs to be. First, let’s cover what constitutes a data loss incident and what some of the most popular reasons for experiencing them are. Then, we’ll dive into the popular ways you can mitigate the risk.

Common Data Loss Incident Occurrences

Here are some of the common situations that could lead to data loss for your typical business:

• Natural disasters, which include hurricanes, electrical storms, tornadoes, winter weather, floods, and fires.
• Data loss caused by user error, such as improper configuration of systems or a failure to perform duties as needed.
• Cybersecurity incidents that lead to data compromisation, corruption, or theft.

Implementing Backup and Disaster Recovery

The one big thing that the above have in common is that they immediately threaten your data infrastructure. When your data is unavailable due to any of the above, you need to have data backup and disaster recovery systems in place to keep downtime and data loss to a minimum. Typically, a BDR solution will work by backing up your data to multiple secure locations off-site if your infrastructure is damaged. It can then restore your data to any device designated to get operations back in order.

Securing Your Infrastructure

Of course, natural disasters are far from the only danger to your business’ data infrastructure. Cyberthreats and hackers exclusively target your technological assets in hopes of either disrupting your business operations or profiting from your data. One of the most dangerous threats out there, ransomware, is so wicked in its deployment that often the only feasible way to get your data back is to restore a recent backup.

We always recommend that businesses protect their infrastructures with both comprehensive security measures and adequate data backup and disaster recovery methods. Coleman Technologies can help your organization overcome the many challenges of data loss prevention, backup, and disaster recovery. To learn more about our solutions, call us at (604) 513-9428 today.

What Do You Need Your Computer For?

There are a lot of different computers on the market. Some are created by big-box stores and branded with a fancy name. Some are thrown together inexpensively by your cousin. Regardless of who puts your computer together, knowing what you need the system for is the best way to determine what components you need inside of your system. After all, there are some big differences between the components that make up a workstation designed to run web apps and a CRM as opposed to a system that has been designed as a video editing station. 

For practical purposes, we will focus on cost-effective CPU options, since higher-end computing options used for audio/video production or gaming can get extremely expensive, quickly. Remember, you can typically upgrade a computer’s CPU, but it's not going to be cost-effective to turn a low-end PC into a gaming rig, whether its a desktop or a laptop. 

CPU Specifications

When you are shopping for a new computer, you’ll see a spec sheet accompanying the computer. You will see a myriad of components listed. Today we are going to talk about the CPU.

The CPU determines just how much “computing” your computer can accomplish at once, and how fast it will load that information up. Nowadays, there are two brands you’ll run into; Intel and AMD. Intel, in an attempt to simplify an otherwise complicated component, tiers most if their CPUs: Core i3, Core i5, Core i7, and Core i9. The larger the number, the more powerful the CPU. AMD recently has followed suit with its Ryzen series of processors. Since both brands make both low-end and high-end CPUs, it's important that you understand what each type of processor would be used for. Let’s take a look.

Intel

Core i3 - This tier is found in budget PCs and works fine for low-end processing. If you need to edit documents, check email, or surf the web, is a good, cheap option. The latest generation of Core i3 processors are strong enough to handle streaming video services like YouTube and Netflix without too much trouble.

Core i5 - The i5 will do what the i3 can do, just a little faster. Users will have no problem streaming video, doing some light photo editing, and maybe playing a game or two if it isn’t too resource-intensive. The Core i5 is a solid choice if you are building a workstation for your office.

Core i7 - Core i7 CPUs are more expensive and geared towards high-end systems for video editing and gaming. If your team has resource-intensive applications, a Core i7 processor will provide plenty of oomph for just about any task. 

Core i9 - The Core i9, introduced in late 2018, is Intel’s fastest and best commercial grade processor. If you are building out a computer for 3D animation, rendering, gaming while streaming, or scientific calculations, then this might be the way to go, but the price tag for this CPU alone can be several thousands of dollars. 

AMD Ryzen 3 - AMD’s low end model is, to simplify things, on par with the Intel Core i3. You’ll be able to edit documents and surf the web, but not a whole lot else without straining the system.

AMD Ryzen 5 - The Ryzen 5 is in about the same tier as the Intel Core i5. You’ll pay a little more than the Ryzen 3, and get some more performance out of your desktop. Expect to handle typical office work, streaming video, and be able to do some light photo editing and gaming.

AMD Ryzen 7 - The Ryzen 7 is AMD’s answer to the Intel Core i7. Just like the i7, the cost of the CPU starts to climb pretty significantly compared to the lower-end models.

AMD Threadripper - The Threadripper is designed for heavy loads like 3D animation, gaming while broadcasting your stream, and other intense computing that a typical workstation isn’t traditionally used for.

When Does the GHz Matter?
At one time, users would have to consider the clock speed of their processors, but now with these manufacturers tiering their products, these numbers can often be ignored. The higher the GHz number, the faster the CPU, and the more it costs. Until you get to the point where you are building a server or high-end gaming PC, you can definitely just worry about the tiers instead of the GHz.

Does the Number of Cores Matter?
Cores are the number of processors built within the main processor. Typically, shoot for at least four cores unless you are on a serious budget. For gaming and video editing and higher-end tasks, more cores can start to matter, but even then, most of the time the number caps off at eight. There are processors out there with dozens of cores, but typically these are designed for servers or specific uses.

You may start to look up older processors, only to find that it isn’t going to save you a lot of money. This is largely because older CPUs, even products like Intel’s Core 2 Duo, have clock speeds in range of today’s comparable processors. Going with newer hardware is always preferable as they typically won’t have as good of a chance to fail. 

In part two of our computer buying guide we will continue to sort through the other components of a new PC. If you would like help with building computers for your business, call the IT professionals at Coleman Technologies today at (604) 513-9428. We can help you sort through all the options and improve your chances of being happy with your new hardware.