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Directive Blogs

Directive has been serving the Oneonta area since 1993, providing IT Support such as technical helpdesk support, computer support, and consulting to small and medium-sized businesses.

It Pays to Invest in Security Awareness Training… Here’s What to Include

Security awareness training is a critical process for modern businesses to undergo to have any chance of success. Unfortunately, as much as security software or policy can help, it can only do so much. You also need your team members to be on board, knowledgeable about what they need to do, and motivated to do it. 

In light of this, let’s talk about security awareness training and what it needs to involve.

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Tip of the Week: Three Practices to Reduce Consternation About Your Technology

Technology plays a massive role for most organizations nowadays, and not everyone always grasps the importance of it. Most of the time, there is so much built into today’s enterprise software that it can often be overwhelming for workers to use it effectively. Today, we will give you three tips on how to help employees get a grasp of the technology their productivity depends on.

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So, Your Business Project Failed… How Can You Learn from It?

It can be challenging to deal with failure in any context, but in the case of your workplace projects and other efforts, it can be particularly harsh. This makes it all the more important to frame such failures as opportunities to grow in the future.

Let’s discuss six reasons an initiative may fail and the lessons that can be learned from these situations.

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Research Shows Many New Cybersecurity Professionals are Doomed to Make Blunders

Unfortunately, cyberattacks will only continue in the weeks, months, and years to come, making it increasingly essential that businesses have access to cybersecurity expertise. Even more unfortunately, professionals with this level of expertise are becoming harder to find. Globally, we’re short almost four million people, and those we have are prone to make mistakes in their first few years. This comes from a report by Kaspersky, entitled “The Portrait of Modern Information Security Professional,” Let’s review what the cybersecurity developer found and what we can take away from these findings.

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Invest in Your Business’ Future with Security Best Practices

Nowadays, it is crucial that you make security a top priority. With the right approach, it not only saves you massive headaches, but also a considerable amount of capital—particularly if you leverage the appropriate solutions for SMBs. As a managed service provider, we can ensure that you implement the appropriate IT solutions to maximize the return on your security investment.

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Four Strategies to Help Build Robust Cybersecurity

Your business' IT security effectiveness relies heavily on how well your technology works. With this in mind, educating your staff on their responsibility to safeguard your business’ digital assets is important. Let’s explore the key priorities businesses need to consider to establish a robust security training platform that works to protect those assets.

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You Have to Prioritize IT Training

For the IT administrator and the small business owner, it can be a bewildering experience when your company comes under siege from employee-induced cyberthreats; especially if you, like many other companies, have started prioritizing security training. Even if the threat is thwarted early and the effect on the business is negligible, it is important that you trust the people who have access to your organization’s digital resources. Let’s look at some of the reasons some of your staff take cybersecurity initiatives worse than others. 

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What Every Business Owner Needs to Know About Security Training

The effectiveness of your business’ IT security is largely contingent on how your IT operates. As a result, it is extremely important to ensure that your staff understands the role they play in protecting your business’ assets. This month, we discuss what you should prioritize when putting together a security training platform; an essential part of any business’ attempts to keep their IT secure. 

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Get Your Staff to Understand Their Role in Cybersecurity

Security is an incredibly important part of running a business, but it’s extremely easy for busy employees to fall short of the security expectations you might place on them. This is why it is so important to train your employees on the many facets of cybersecurity. By training them, you are preparing them to tackle the plethora of challenges they will encounter throughout the workday.

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Behind Employee Cybersecurity Efforts or Lack Thereof

Cyberattacks can cost businesses a lot of money. They’re also more prevalent today than ever before. It seems you can’t go a couple of news cycles without hearing about some organization that has been hacked or scammed and it’s resulted in the sensitive data the organization holds being sold online, vast operational downtime, or worse. For this reason, many organizations have deliberately built up their cybersecurity infrastructure, enhanced their policies, and invested in training to ensure that they aren’t the next victim. Unfortunately, this attention doesn’t always work. 

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Is Virtual Reality an Option for Your Business?

Virtual reality has been one of the coolest technologies available for over a decade. Today’s applications make it an exciting piece of tech for individuals; and you’ve seen that market expand (especially during the pandemic) with Facebook, Sony, HTC, and HP coming to market with a VR offering. The question we wanted to look at is how VR could be used at a business like yours.

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Is Your View of Your Business’ IT Realistic?

When you invest in a new technology solution, you might be wearing your rose-tinted glasses and expecting too much from the solution right out of the box. We all have expectations for what we want the solution to accomplish, but sometimes these expectations simply are not realistic. Let’s take a look at some common misconceptions people have about technology in the workplace, especially in regards to implementation.

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You’ll Want to Have a Training Plan to Improve Your Employees’ Skills

When businesses onboard new employees, they typically have a series of qualifications they need applicants to meet in order to get to the interview process. Once they interview and are chosen from a list of applicants, the new hire does his/her entrance training and then it’s time to get to work. If your business doesn’t have the right training platforms in place, however, this process can take a lot longer than you’d like. This month, we thought we’d take a bit to go over this process and how getting the right training protocols in place upfront can have a positive effect on the way your new employees hit the ground running.

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Train your Staff on These Four Security Strategies

Are you one of the countless people who find themselves performing repetitive tasks like moving files around, working with people on the phone, navigating email, or updating information? It’s easy to find yourself in a situation where one wrong click can create a plethora of issues, and nowhere is this more apparent than in the case of network security.

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Four Considerations for Your Business’ Security

Millions of people find themselves sitting in front of a computer moving files around and corresponding with people over the phone, through email, or updating info in the company’s line of business app. What many of them don’t know, however, is that, at any time, they are only a couple of clicks away from causing major problems for their company. This is why it is extremely important to train your staff on what to look for and how to address those situations when they do arise.

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Looking to Improve Your Technology Skills? Look to YouTube

While it’s hard to say anything positive about the COVID-19 pandemic, it has given many business owners the motivation to pick up a few more technical skills. Many have sought to improve their own grasp on the software, marketing, and telecommunications that their business relies on each day. As these business owners have done so, they have often turned to a very popular resource: YouTube.

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Train Your Staff to Protect Your Business

In the course of doing business, sometimes the mundane and repetitive tasks, or the responsibilities that employees don’t necessarily always consider to be part of their jobs, can be overlooked. Like any other business, yours needs people to be vigilant to ensure that it isn’t the victim of a phishing attack. If your team isn’t well-trained, or if it isn’t engaged in the fight against cybercrime, you may find that your business is a sitting duck.

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IT Training That Is Sure to Get the Desired Effect

A business without well-trained employees is one that is always on the precipice of disaster. With the threat landscape the way it is, you need your staff to know how to properly maneuver around company IT and you need to ensure they know how to protect themselves and the company in a digital environment. Today, we will take a look at some strategies to promote end-to-end security at your company.

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Should You Be Holding Your Staff Accountable for Failed Phishing Tests?

It can be a real head-scratcher when one of your otherwise well-performing employees routinely falls for the simulated phishing attacks that you roll out as a part of your cybersecurity awareness strategy. For all intents and purposes, the person is a great employee, but when it comes to acting with caution, they fail. If you’ve made a point to prioritize your staff’s working knowledge of phishing attacks, do you replace this employee? We’ll take a look at it today.

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How to Properly Train Your Staff to Avoid Phishing Attacks

In the late 1970s and early 1980s, Bell telephone companies were making a mint off of offering the ability to call your friends and family that lived outside your predefined region, charging up to $2 per minute (during peak hours) for long distance calls. The problem for many people was that these regions kept shrinking. Some people decided to combat this costly system by reverse engineering the system of tones used to route long-distance calls, thus routing their own calls without the massive per-minute charges demanded by long-distance providers. These people were called Phreakers, and they were, in effect, the first hackers.

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A Look at How Cloud Computing Professionals Can Help Your Business

When you hear us speak the world “cloud,” it’s not the fluffy white forms soaring overhead. The cloud that we refer to are computing systems that are delivered to you through an Internet connection. The popularity and demand for cloud services has led both ordinary consumers and businesses alike to seek them out. Despite this demand, in the United States alone, there are over 500,000 IT jobs available. This suggests that there may be a shortage of workers with the requisite skillset and can provide a unique incentive to join the industry as to take advantage of such massive growth.

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5 Personnel Expenses Saved By Outsourcing IT

b2ap3_thumbnail_thisguy400.jpgIt's convenient to have an in-house IT technician. If your computer freezes up, you can call the IT department and they will swoop in and save the day. This is how in-house IT is supposed to work, but it's hard to hire anyone that's 100% reliable. We think it's actually more advantageous to outsource your IT; here are 5 reasons why.

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