Vorboss launches Simply Connected to simplify connectivity, IT and cybersecurity management for London businesses

As an established managed IT services provider, Pebble IT will continue to offer end-to-end IT solutions to all of its existing UK-based and global SME customers. Backed by FPE Capital, Optimity has transformed London’s high-speed connectivity market by providing a unique alternative to fibre connectivity and has extended its product set into a full IT service for smart campus and workplace environments.

With the popularity of VoIP for cheaper, flexible, scalable phone capacity, many of us are now also using connectivity where a traditional phone line was used. And boxed licenses are being replaced with subscription based services such as O365, offering a more economical solution for businesses. Our employees are still running the show, but it’s our connectivity that’s allowing them to do it.

There are a variety of factors that can take your connectivity down, from natural disasters, to cyberattacks, human error or issues like damaged fibre. Outages of several days have been experienced by businesses when every day occurrences such as fires breaking out or builders severing links.

The best strategy to avoid this, is to organise an internet failover. This is a redundant connectivity solution, on-hand, and ready to take over when your primary connection goes down. It should be totally independent of your main solution. This can be achieved by using a different ISP but be aware that different fibre providers may be using the same infrastructure so be vulnerable to the same issues. It is actually better to use two entirely different methods of accessing the internet.

Employing a diverse medium, such as wireless fibre, can cost as little as £150 a month, yet businesses who would never contemplate operating without insurance, don’t prioritise it. Spending less than £2000 a year to ensure continuity of connectivity and protect your business’ ability to function, just makes sense.

Wireless fibre (like Optimity’s Wibre™ solution) can kick in when fibre fails. Yes, it can also be vulnerable to some of the same factors like natural disasters, but it can’t be damaged by diggers, is less susceptible to cyber threats (its high levels of security means it was initially used by the military) and because of its physical location, it’s less vulnerable to human error.

Spending a couple of hundred pounds a month to secure your data can save you the thousands it would cost with just one day of no connectivity. The cross over could be so instantaneous, your business wouldn’t miss a beat, you could still answer and make calls, access business critical functions and operate totally normally.

A lot of businesses don’t realise the level of disruption until they face such a challenge, but if you are a business operating without a backup connectivity solution, as part of your continuity plan, you are doing yourself a disservice. It really should be at the forefront of your strategy and not a costly afterthought.

Businesses often don’t realise that to make the most of their connectivity they need to make sure that they have adequate Wi-Fi hardware in place. This is why even those businesses which clearly take their technology seriously and have invested in things like the correct bandwidth to grow, have Wi-Fi blackspots. Maybe a quick walk across the office with their laptop will see an employee drop their connection, or they can’t check their email in the outdoor spaces, or receive a decent download speed in half of their existing private offices. It’s not true Wi-Fi if it doesn’t work everywhere, and employees are still tied to one area of the building to get the best out of it.

Often, this problem isn’t due to a lack of budget or effort – just that the office’s Wi-Fi infrastructure hasn’t been well planned and organised. Or maybe it was originally, but with a bit of a reshuffle or an increase in employee numbers, it isn’t anymore.

Wi-Fi capabilities cover a wide spectrum and nowadays at the high-spec end, can support businesses to do some really amazing things. It’s not a coincidence that large retailers offer Wi-Fi. They brand their splash page to offer it to customers and then meticulously design their shops around the data that they collect with it. From capturing information on the areas that you dwell in or revisit, merged with past purchases and buyer behaviours, they start to put together your buyer persona for targeted marketing. Once you are using their Wi-Fi and have agreed to their terms and conditions, it’s quite easy for them to see for example that you searched for a price comparison and left the shop without a purchase. This prompts them to send you an email offering you a cheaper price or deal later, armed with the information that cost may be your primary concern.

Same for event spaces, where organisers can use Wi-Fi analysis to establish the most popular areas to exhibit or demo their products.

To benefit from a true Wi-Fi solution, it needs to be tailormade to your office, your floor plan, how many employees you have and how you want those employees to be able to work.

Customers can invest in the right connectivity solution but with the wrong wireless access points are not going to get the performance they are expecting. They are paying for a certain amount of bandwidth and anticipating what each of their employees will get, but sadly, they bought the car but not the tyres.

The good news is it’s easy to deploy access points, particularly if you do so with the help of specialists to get an idea of affordability and budget. At Optimity, we often do Wi-Fi audits for our new customers so that we can make sure they are getting the most bang for their buck and everything makes sense with regards to upload and downloads speeds. This provides the ability for everyone in your office to work at the same speed or alternatively, prioritise the most important traffic. We’ve got lots of clever tools to see how much coverage you get and to make sure that we've got the access points in the right place. We can also make sure that you have gigabyte compatible access points.

Something else that we’d like businesses to know is that if they are going to have a Wi-Fi solution, they really also need to make sure that they have good security. That means having a firewall in place. There are a few solutions which really are dependent on each other for businesses to get the most out of each of them and connectivity, Wi-Fi and security is one such group. If any of this doesn’t make sense, get in touch and we can advise you on making the most of your connectivity and your budget, while staying secure and online.

Sounds easy enough if you say it quickly, but as anyone who’s managed IT recovery on this scale before knows, recreating an entire operation (sometimes off-site) with minimal impact on a business’s day-to-day operation, requires strategic thinking, expert planning, practicality, serious organisational skills and cross-business collaboration. This is why so many businesses in London employ the help of an IT consultant to help them get it right.

Because so many businesses require secondary office space, resources and IT skills in the event of a disaster or recovery incident, business continuity planning is not something you can leave to chance and mobilise easily if something happens.

A good business continuity plan will include:

• Arrangements for alternate office space (if required)
• The basic facilities and services to allow the business to keep functioning
• A plan to restore critical IT applications and
• The IT infrastructure necessary to recover normal business processes

It’s a big job, but with local expert IT support, it’s something you can plan well, allowing you to rest a little easier, knowing everything you need is in place and good to go, if you ever need it.

What can an IT consultant help with?

Project Management

• Project managing the plan from start to finish, getting buy-in from senior managers and collaboration across the business. An outsourced IT service can create and put your business continuity plan in place, or help your existing IT team build one in-house, assigning clear roles and responsibilities, and training employees on what will be expected of them if the plan ever needs to be put into action, should disaster strike.
• Evaluating risk and adding protection and cyber security where there are vulnerabilities. For example, automated malware updates or increased user security to protect sensitive customer data.
• Performing impact analysis, identifying business-critical processes and the knock-on effects of events such as a power outage that brings down a business’s online payment systems.

Strategic Management

• Developing a business continuity strategy that includes business-critical systems, maintaining functionality, prioritising services and creating a failsafe environment that allows the business to remain operational and profitable. This would include a process-level strategy with step-by-step plans detailing how essential services will be restored, what is involved in data recovery, and who is responsible for each task.

Rapid Response

• Creating a crisis management process, documenting the tasks required end-to-end, and training each employee on their responsibilities. This should also include designing the contingency plan for individual business units, so every team understands exactly where they fit in the bigger BCP picture, and the priority tasks in the event of an incident.

BCP Culture Building

• Training businesses on how to raise awareness of the importance of best practices such as safe and compliant back-up of data, encouraging cross-business collaboration and sharing helpful, practical tips on how to manage ongoing employee training (without the IT jargon).

Testing, Maintenance and Auditing

• Helping a business test and audit plans with a robust IT health-check strategy for new or existing BCPs. This should include running live exercises to make sure everything works as it should, so you can get a sense of what it’s like to go into BCP mode in real-time, identify any gaps in the process and take actions to put it right before a real event occurs.
  

At Optimity, we can provide the IT support your organisation needs to create and maintain an effective Business Continuity Plan that will keep things business as usual, even if an unforeseen setback occurs.

Find out what you need to do to keep your business running, and how we can help.

Firewalls are widely available and getting one set up on your network is easy, but it’s worth discussing:

• What a firewall is
• How it works
• The advantages of using one
• What it cannot do

So, what is a Firewall?

Having a firewall is like having a shield or barrier around your company’s IT network. It can help protect you and your users from malicious content by denying entry to your network.

But with so much content on the internet, how does it know what to let in and what to reject? The answer lies in things called packets. These process the website traffic that wants to make its way into your network.

When the packet reaches your firewall, the firewall will then make a decision. If it thinks the data in the packet is safe, it will let it into your network. If it thinks the data is harmful, it will reject it.

Many devices have a built-in firewall that works this way. This is called a hardware firewall.

For extra safety, you can install an additional firewall using a third-party application. Another name for this is a software firewall. It can monitor the traffic that is going out and whitelist any sites that are known to be dangerous.

How does a Firewall Work?

As we mentioned, there are two kinds of firewall: hardware and software. A hardware firewall is a physical appliance in your communications rack which all your internet traffic routes through and monitors incoming and outgoing web traffic. A software firewall is installed on servers, appliances and desktops and helps to monitor incoming and outgoing web traffic.

They work differently but serve the same purpose: to protect your network and keep your users safe from malicious activity.

There are lots of public lists that can be cross checked by your firewall to ensure harmful websites are blocked. The firewall can also pick up on inbound virus, crypto lockers and other nasty web elements you want to keep out.

Most devices come with a hardware firewall built-in, so there is little setup required and they are easy to get on all devices in your network.

Software firewalls usually must be installed with a third-party application, meaning some manual setup will be needed. You will also have to get licensing to cover all the devices that the software is installed on.

Once you have a firewall setup, there are lots of configurations you can deploy. You can arrange for it to monitor and block traffic based on several criteria, including:

• IP address. This is a unique 32-bit number that is assigned to every web address. The 32-bit number is presented as four ‘octets’ in a ‘dotted decimal number’, like this: ‘216.28.62.138’.
• Content filtering. Block/whitelist certain categories of websites based on organisational policies ie blocking social media websites
• Domain name. Perhaps the easiest way of identifying a website. Ours is www.optimity.co.uk.
• Protocols. How someone accesses an online service. The protocol for a web browser would be ‘https’.
• Ports. Server machines make services available to web users with numbered ports. You would usually find a web server on port 80.
• Words and phrases. If you don’t want your users visiting a site with a particular word or phrase on it, you can set up your firewall to work this way.
• Behaviours and changes. To help detect behavioural changes and secure the network, such as hacking attacks, or large data removal across the web.

The Advantages of a Firewall

You can prevent unauthorised remote access

Imagine this: you are sitting at your computer or tablet, and you see the cursor moving on-screen, but you aren’t moving your mouse. Somebody is using your device remotely. Unauthorised remote access means you are no longer in control, and the person who has accessed your device could get hold of any information they want. Firewalls can help prevent this from happening.

You can test lots of configurations

There are so many ways you can set up a firewall in order to protect your network. Your IT support provider will be able to help you determine what the most effective methods will be.

One of these methods might be to temporarily block access to everything. Although this may seem time-consuming, you will be able to work out what access is essential for your users. You can then allow or deny access to non-essential sites on a case-by-case basis.

You can combine hardware and software firewalls for ultimate resilience

Most devices come with a hardware firewall by default, which can offer protection against incoming traffic. When you install a software firewall, you will also be getting protection from outgoing traffic and a whitelist of known dangerous activity.

For extra protection, you should equip all of your devices with a software firewall. That way, you can reduce the spread of malicious content between your network users.

Firewalls are great for all the reasons we have mentioned here, but they are not always enough on their own. Sometimes, extra software and human initiative is needed to provide maximum safety.

What a Firewall can’t do

Firewalls cannot always block a social engineering or spoofing attack. For these, a hacker will imitate a legitimate company online in order to trick you into doing something you shouldn’t. Because they look real, they may slip past a firewall unnoticed. Email scanning software can help to prevent this though.

Firewalls won’t always prevent malware, viruses and worms from entering your network either. For this, you need an antivirus software programme. In the event of something getting past your network, your antivirus will be able to deal with it.

While all of this should help keep you well protected, it can never hurt to use your own knowledge of cybersecurity best practices and educate employees about this. Your employees need to have a good knowledge of these because statistically speaking they are your biggest (albeit unintentional) threat.

Things you can all be doing include:

• Regularly updating software. A lot of software will update itself automatically, but it is always worth ensuring that this is the case. It is essential for avoiding glitches and bugs.
• Using strong passwords. Make these as hard as possible for cybercriminals to guess, and do not share them with anyone. Even the people you trust.
• Being aware of spoofing attacks. This is when an email or website or email sender appears to look legitimate but is malicious. Keep a careful eye on domains, sender information, attachments and content, and don’t do anything you feel unsure about.

Protect Your Network With a Firewall

Hardware and software firewalls are both designed to protect your network from malicious activity. Most devices come with a hardware firewall built-in, which monitors incoming traffic. A software firewall has to be installed and licenced for each device and can monitor outgoing traffic.

Firewalls can monitor and prevent access to websites based on lots of factors, including:

• IP addresses
• Domains
• Protocols
• Ports
• Words and phrases

And with a firewall, you can:

• Protect your network from unauthorised remote access
• Trial lots of configurations
• Combine a hardware and software firewall for ultimate resilience

But firewalls cannot do everything by themselves. That is why your employees need to have a good knowledge of cybersecurity best practices, and you should combine your hardware and software firewalls with an antivirus programme.

To learn more about firewalls and what is available for your network, contact us for a managed networks quote. We can help you determine what kind of protection your business needs.

One of the ways it has done this is simply by suddenly becoming so affordable. Whatever your business size and budget, there is a relatively inexpensive and adequate connectivity solution out there for you. That’s not something that could have been truthfully reported just a few years back.

During the ‘copper’ years, it was far too expensive for most businesses to afford robust, reliable and fast enough (never mind ultrafast) bandwidth. Only large corporates could afford the bandwidth that would allow large numbers of employees to be on multiple systems with no delay or disruption to service.

Nowadays there is a broadband solution for every size of business, covering every requirement, connecting employees from different geographical locations, not only to each other and their customers, but to important business systems needed to fulfil their role and delivered on any device the business requires.

Great connectivity allows business to grow, both physically – because staff numbers are no longer an issue – and geographically because employees can work anywhere and still have access to each other and the data that they need. This allows employees to work remotely and flexibly and businesses to locate their offices and people in the right areas to prosper.

Cloud-based solutions are not the be all and end all, but they categorically allow businesses of any size to afford scalable and flexible solutions to increase efficiency, security and productivity at a fraction of what they used to cost.

With today’s available broadband, businesses can choose not to invest in any hardware – which was traditionally costly to purchase, manage and maintain. They can simply pay per month for a host of managed cloud solutions that they can access over the internet. Once integrated, they really don’t have to think twice about them.

These can range from storage, to back up, to CRMs, to IP telephony and email solutions. Whilst poor broadband maybe used to be able to access these services, it could not be relied upon to do it seamlessly, delivering things like crystal clear calls and quick upload and download speeds on a regular basis. This is because every solution requires a certain amount of bandwidth and most businesses simply didn’t have enough to go around to make calls over the internet, access online files and deal with web traffic etc at the same time.

Speaking to customers and other employees was originally potentially quite a costly, inflexible affair, with just traditional telephone lines and mobile devices. The benefit of good connectivity means that VoIP (voice over internet protocol) has really turned that around. This is particularly the case for internal calls from office to office which can be free when calling over the internet. Not only are VoIP’s crystal-clear calls halving phone bills, they also offer a wealth of functionality like call forwarding and diverting to other people and devices, or to different platforms like messenger and of course, video conferencing. VoIP increases employee collaboration, because it’s easy to get together, improves customer service because customers aren’t kept hanging on in the dark, and is good for employee wellbeing because they are able to work more flexibly without missing important calls and meetings. But it’s only made possible with decent, secure and reliable access to the internet.

Another massive benefit of better broadband is its impact on marketing. Attracting and engaging with customers now relies so heavily on the internet, that for the first time, businesses are spending more money advertising on the web than on television. Be it through social media, email campaigns, online blogs, e-commerce sites, or online chat facilities, it’s quite clear that slow, unreliable connectivity is the kiss of death.

If you are a business in 2019, you have a wealth of opportunities open to you that technology can deliver. It doesn’t matter your business size, function or area, reputable providers can get you connected to suit your budget in any location, including blackspots where businesses have traditionally had to suffer. Finding a provider you can trust to deliver what you need can sometimes be a chore, but once you do, everything from there onwards should be pretty much plain sailing.