Catherine Miles

We are all living in a new age. The idea of everyone lining up on the freeways to head from suburbia into the city for work is left in the fifties to be replaced by video conferencing from the living room and shushing our ‘coworkers’ when they burst into the room. This new normal has been an adjustment, but what are we doing now with the challenges and opportunities that it provides?  People will always adapt, and it is important that our organizations are adapting to not only fit the new lifestyle but also maintain the same standards of safety and standards as before. With all of these changes comes a surge of hackers that are taking advantage of the new holes in procedures and gaps in communication.  Different kinds of attacks: There are a few specialized kinds of attacks that are becoming more prevalent in 2020. The first is business-focused mobile phishing attacks. Mobile security is just as important as the computers that organizations have in their physical offices. ...

When it comes to your organization, especially its technology, some of the buzzwords you hear floating around can be pretty convincing, almost intoxicating. Unfortunately, like most buzzwords, many of these are aggrandized beyond their worth to the average business. Let’s take a look at how this can impact a business’ perception of its cybersecurity, as well as dig into the reality behind these terms. To begin, let’s examine a phrase coined in the early 2000s by cybersecurity technologist Bruce Schneier: “security theater.” What is “Security Theater?” Security theater is a simple shorthand for any security efforts put in place that do little to better ensure one’s security, despite making one much more comfortable, generally for some considerable cost. The idea behind it is that security exists as both a reality based in math and science, and as a perception that is based in emotion. In a 2007 blog article, Schneier cited a personal anecdote where a friend’s newborn was fitted wit...

NEW YORK, August 12, 2020 – Inc. magazine today revealed that Cima Solutions Group is No. 3094 on its annual Inc. 5000 list, the most prestigious ranking of the nation’s fastest-growing private companies. The list represents a unique look at the most successful companies within the American economy’s most dynamic segment—its independent small businesses. Intuit, Zappos, Under Armour, Microsoft, Patagonia, and many other well-known names gained their first national exposure as honorees on the Inc. 5000. Not only have the companies on the 2020 Inc. 5000 been very competitive within their markets, but the list as a whole shows staggering growth compared with prior lists as well. The 2020 Inc. 5000 achieved an incredible three-year average growth of over 500 percent and a median rate of 165 percent. The Inc. 5000’s aggregate revenue was $209 billion in 2019, accounting for over 1 million jobs over the past three years. Complete results of the Inc. 5000, including company profiles and ...

We talk about the idea of a value-added relationship between our clients and our partners. But what does that really mean to be a value-added reseller? What is it that brings our clients coming back for more? Let’s read on to find out. What is a Value-Added Reseller? A value-added reseller (VAR) really is just what it sounds like. We are companies that buy direct from manufacturers and either bundle or add to it to sell back to our clients. Through that process, we are adding value to the original product. This is especially important in the technology industry and government agencies for a few reasons. One important addition provided is possible training or setup associated with specific systems and programs. Having someone on staff that constantly has to learn and relearn is expensive. VARs like us bridge that gap and stay up to date with new products and solutions. This could be new software to cybersecurity protocols developed just for your organization. The expense doesn’t a...

The disease known as COVID-19 has changed people’s personal lives for better or worse. It has also changed the way government agencies have to function. Operating on overload and having to educate a panicking public at the same time has its challenges. Let’s unpack what issues they are facing now as well as what lingering IT issues from the past are holding them back from their fullest potential. Old Challenges Made Harder The pandemic has had its impact on everyone, namely the state and local government agencies that everyone is now looking to for answers. But those problems, that have been there for decades now, haven’t gone away. Most of them are now magnified by the effect of this pandemic in every country across the globe.  One thing that even the private sector can have issues with is how to engage with their customers, or in this case, constituents. Governments began the shift to social media a bit behind the herd, but they are making tons of ground. That being said, how...

For the past few months, a much larger percentage of people have been working from home. This remote workforce has proven to be much more effective than many would have thought, but some companies haven’t had the success getting the production out of their remote workers that others have. Today, we present three tips that will help you get the most out of your remote workforce. 1. Communication Is Extremely Important When people who work together–and typically see one another–don’t for long periods of time, you may think that collaboration would stall and productivity would wane. This may not be the case for businesses that have the communication tools in place to make it work. To get a jump on this, taking the initiative and using the conferencing tools to have regular virtual meetings is a good way to give and get feedback, give direction, and ensure everyone is on the same page. 2. Provide the Tools Needed for Collaboration This is basically an extension of the first point, but...

As workplaces and offices everywhere have struggled to cope with the restrictions brought on by social distancing mandates, the adoption of automated solutions has surged ahead. Of course, this does open a few important questions to consider. For instance, what this could mean for employment post-pandemic, and how automation may be used in the future to mitigate the impacts we’re currently experiencing. The Situation As COVID-19 spread across the world, many businesses suddenly found themselves in a very tough spot—especially those who were not deemed essential and were therefore unable to open to help reduce the risk to their employees. To try and counter this, many businesses have adopted assorted tools to simplify their responsibilities and maximize their output—including automation. Pharmaceutical companies, for instance, are feeling significant pressure to deliver right now, as many are seeking treatment options for the COVID-19 virus. To assist with the more administrative an...

Hope can be a big part of a person’s notion to start their own business. Needless to say that entrepreneurial hope doesn’t always consider that there will be a global pandemic that grinds the operational effectiveness that you’ve spent years building to a halt. Hope does, however, play a big part in the creation of a business continuity plan. Today, we’ll briefly discuss why you should never lose hope and how being prepared stems from the same notion as starting a business. Business continuity used to be as simple as making sure that you have a contingency for every analogue system that your business uses in the course of doing business. As the workplace has gotten more digital, however, business continuity has had to take into account the immense amount of stress one failing system can have over the other digital systems that your business relies on. This shift makes it imperative that you plan ahead. The strategy for planning is about the same. You need to do a complete assessment...

All a business’ technology is important to its operations, but based on its industry, certain priorities are bound to arise. A recent survey cast a light on some of these priorities, giving us a view of what small to medium-sized businesses are concerning themselves with. Let’s review some of the trends this survey revealed to see how well your priorities match up. This research, conducted by the market research and industry analysis organization Techaisle, collected responses from SMBs and consolidated them to help rank what they saw to be their biggest business challenges, as well as challenges that their technology faced and their technological priorities. They also produced the results from the surveyed small businesses specifically. Let’s look at these results, to see how closely your views match up. Issues In terms of the biggest issues that these businesses face, the survey’s results pretty much fell in line with what many would consider common sense. Identified as these top...

Video conferencing is a crucial technology for businesses, especially now. Although, while it has the benefits of accessibility, it certainly is a different animal than your run-of-the-mill in-person meeting… as due to this, it has a challenge that an in-person meeting does not. Let’s go over what this challenge is, and how to overcome it. The Biggest Challenge in Video Conferencing Unfortunately, there’s a big disadvantage to video conferencing and that’s the inherent lag that so commonly takes place during meetings. While this may not sound like much, it matters a lot. Based on the length of time that we’ve spent communicating face-to-face and communicating remotely, the latter is barely a blip on the timeline. We’ve had telephony, the first form of voice-based telecommunications, for about 100 years. Conversations, on the other hand, have taken place for 70,000 (give or take). As our brains developed, they adjusted to make these conversations as efficient as possible. This mean...

Today’s businesses are more dependent on collaboration than ever before, and that’s without even taking the current social climate into consideration. However, accounting for these considerations, it seemed appropriate that we shared a few tips to help increase your collaborative capabilities while your team is working remotely. Prioritize Concision and Clarity While communication is vital to your business, it can become detrimental to your operations if it is abused. Think about the meeting that goes on endlessly with only a little being accomplished. This is never a good situation, and it’s only all the worse when the team you’re working with is a remote one. Make sure your team is using its technology appropriately and keeping things efficient and streamlined. Adopting a company shorthand can help move communications along—a quick label tossed in the message can give it a little more context. For instance, adding NRN to a message for “No Response Needed” lets the person getting ...

Are you looking for a way to protect your IT systems once and for all? Do you need data backup and recovery services at your doorstep yesterday? With managed backup and data recovery services, we’re right there to assist you with any of your technological needs. Without our services, your company may remain vulnerable to security breaches, natural disasters, malware/hackers, and lost wages. How quickly can you recover your data operations after they’ve decided to take a trip south? Outages might be hampering your employee productivity without you even knowing it – that’s why we offer complete protection for all of your most important systems, data, and personal information. The Steps We Take to Secure Your Company Offering the most complete recovery of all your data involves being thorough from the very start. This means that we design our IT plans with your business in mind – custom offsite information storage means that each plan we create is personalized for your company. We beg...

The COVID-19 pandemic has put a lot of stress on people.  Nowhere is this more true than in the small business arena. Small businesses, many of which were forced to suspend or severely alter their operations, are also dealing with cyberattacks. Let’s take a look at the effects COVID-19 has on small businesses regarding cybersecurity. It Was Bad Before, Now It’s Worse Before this whole COVID-19 mess, there were a lot of different threats that businesses had to take into consideration. Now with the fear surrounding the pandemic, scammers have a lot of new ammunition to use to try to steal access and data. The problem is that with everyone distracted, people are being less vigilant and it’s creating more victims. Threats include: Phishing attacks Distributed denial of service attacks Man-in-the-Middle attacks Network based user threats due to negligence or sabotage Any of these can work to undermine your business’ network security and cause major problems from operational di...

With the development of business technology, tools have been introduced that provide greater and greater benefits to organizations that use them. Perhaps the most useful that we have today, the cloud, has enabled businesses of all sizes to take advantage of far better tools than were available to them before. Let’s take a closer look at some of them. Hosted Email Email remains a critical tool for businesses, that much has not changed. What has been changed is how businesses can support this tool. Instead of the once-requisite investment of time, space, and monetary resources that an on-premise email server brought with it, many are using email solutions supported by the cloud. While we’ll go into the additional benefits of Software-as-a-Service aside from email later in this blog, this approach to email has opened greater opportunities to smaller organizations in a more financially feasible package. Hosted VoIP In a similar vein, VoIP, or Voice over Internet Protocol, has offered ...

A business’ computing network is one of their most important tools. Therefore, it’s extremely important that it is managed and maintained properly. Today, we’ll go over a few tips you should keep in mind to ensure that your IT network is managed and secure. Automate to Standardize Some network devices have the ability to import and export configurations and settings. While sometimes certain devices on the network will need their own unique settings and tweaks, spending lots of time to set up a particular device is expensive, so being able to move all that work over to another device doing the same job can save a lot of time and headache. The same goes with basic PC installations - having the base software most of your staff needs installed and at the ready will help speed up the deployment process. This is something that we rely on a lot at COMPANYNAME to keep our work efficient. Monitoring and Troubleshooting Monitoring your network is going to be one of the most critical aspect...

The World Health Organization has been busy dealing with one of the biggest calamities in contemporary times, the COVID-19 pandemic that has had much of the world on pause for the past few months. Unfortunately, they’ve been dealing with an increase in cyberattacks. Today, we’ll take a look at some of the issues the WHO is having with cybercriminals. External Threats With their position at the forefront of society during the pandemic the WHO has unfortunately attracted the less desirables of society, too. Cybercriminals are using the current COVID-19 pandemic, and the WHOs collection for their COVID-19 Solitary Response Fund, to steal information. Other scammers are currently attempting to steal money from people by extracting payment card information and login credentials from retailers and fintech companies. There’s also the matter of state-sponsored hacking, which is continuously trying to capitalize on opportunities presented by this emergency to infiltrate and spy on other nat...

Spoiler alert: it isn’t good news. On September 7th, 2017, it was made public that Equifax had suffered one of the largest cybersecurity breaches in history, and as a result, had left 145.5 million consumers in the United States vulnerable to identity theft. Due to a website application vulnerability, the personally identifiable information of these people was exposed from May until July of that year. As a result, Equifax was ordered to pick up the $700 million tab to help those affected. Everyone who was eligible to apply was promised their choice of free credit monitoring services, or a cash payment of up to $125. Now, with almost a year between us and the ruling, there have been no payments made. This is due to a few appeals to the settlement’s approval that have pushed the delivery of these payments out further. Claims are being reviewed by a neutral settlement administrator. Worse, according to the Federal Trade Commission and Consumer Reports, when any of these payments are ...

As statewide stay-at-home orders lapse, more and more businesses aim to reopen. For a fair share of these businesses, remote technology has been a godsend. For the businesses that cannot reopen yet, being able to monitor your IT infrastructure while you are out of the office is extremely important to the sustainability of your remote access solutions. Today, we’ll discuss monitoring your infrastructure. Grasping IT Infrastructure Monitoring The strategy of infrastructure monitoring covers quite a bit of ground. It includes ensuring that the physical infrastructure is running how it is supposed to, remote access from workers still stuck at home, how much bandwidth is being used, and how all the software that runs your business is functioning. In this case, hardware failures are the real priority. Each hardware failure, whether it is from failed components, power fluctuations, or whatever else, creates downtime. This downtime is extraordinarily expensive, and at a time when nearly ev...

With COVID-19 still in play, working remotely has become how many employees have continued to fulfill their work responsibilities. Now, as we settle into this new way of doing things, the question has arisen: after all this is over, will business operations return to the way they once were? Let’s discuss. “Productivity? From Home? Nah…” At least, this was largely the opinion of many business owners, especially those with smaller organizations to manage. On the surface, this presumption makes sense: there are far more distractions in the home for employees to deal with, without any supervision to keep them on task. From children, to pets, to television and video games, even to household chores, there are far too many ways for an employee to distract themselves and procrastinate. Basically, work was the place that people worked hard, while at home they’d hardly work. Of course, this wasn’t completely based on speculation. There are always going to be certain factors that influence h...

The differences between VoIP and the traditional method behind telephone services are pronounced enough that comparing them isn’t so much a consideration of one team versus the other—VoIP is in another league, practically an entirely different sport. Let’s go over what makes VoIP (Voice over Internet Protocol) so different, and how this offers greater benefits to businesses. What is VoIP? The concept behind VoIP is a very simple one. Instead of using a separate connection (and the associated service) to make phone calls, VoIP allows you to do so over your Internet connection (enabling you to eliminate one of your recurring monthly service costs). If you’ve ever used an application like Skype or Facetime, or called someone using Facebook’s call functionality, you’ve used VoIP before. From the user’s perspective, there is little difference between the two. However, when looking to equip your business with a solution, the differences are substantial. What Makes VoIP Different from a ...