If you are a Scottish-based Small Medium Enterprise or third sector organisation the chance of getting your hands on a £1000 voucher towards showing your business is cyber-savvy is the hottest deal around.
To help tackle cyber threats, businesses and organisations are being given a helping hand to towards achieving the National Cyber Security Centre endorsed Cyber Essentials or Cyber Essentials Plus certificates.
Instead of wondering ‘can my business afford to move to the cloud’, ask yourself this – will your business be at a disadvantage if it doesn’t grasp the benefits that come from using cloud services?
It’s a seismic shift from the way businesses traditionally viewed IT resources but cloud computing services offer transformational opportunities to organisations.
In 2017, Aberdeen City and Shire was top region in Scotland for new business start-ups after breaking the record for a second year.
Delivering Business Gateway services across Aberdeen City and Shire, Elevator helped a total of 1,302 start-ups in that financial year with around 70 new businesses having been set up by those who have faced redundancy from the oil and gas sector.
It’s great to see this level of innovation and business confidence but as well as thinking about first premises, new employees and customers, cybersecurity should be a priority righty from the start among start-ups.
Got brass in pocket? Then you are old school. A colleague of mine hasn’t carried any cash for the past 18 months and is unlikely to revert to his cash-carrying ways.
Whether it’s to purchase a coffee or to buy drinks on a night out, he does it all using a payment app on his phone. The only time he was caught short for cash was to at a charity function that required cash for a game of 'heads or tails’. To save his embarrassment, he borrowed £20 from a friend, paying him instantly back by transferring funds into his account using his online banking app there and then.
There can’t be anyone unaware of the of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) changes which came into effect in May 2018.
Some businesses were proactive and prepared for the changes months ago and we’re still offering guidance and support to firms to help get their house in order.
Among those, we’ve seen recruitment agencies seek out our expertise to assist and shore up their policies and procedures around GDPR compliance.
When it comes to passwords and internet security, sometimes the simpler solutions are actually the best.
Let’s take a closer look at how to truly safeguard the information you value most.
We are often told how essential it is to create numerous complex passwords, and that they should be used uniquely across all our internet applications. The logic behind this decision may seem flawed, but it is rooted in real fears.
However, in practice, having too many passwords can be a terrible headache – not to mention a potential security risk. What if you forget your vital passwords? What if you write them down and misplace the note? What if someone else finds your passwords and accesses your accounts?
Advice for many years has been to simply memorise your passwords instead of storing them. People have been told that storing passwords in any form is inherently a high-risk activity.
While we encourage the use of password managers (alongside recommendations from the National Cybersecurity Centre (NCSC), interest in this tech has remained low. Yet the recommends a refreshed approach to passwords. Would it work for you?
NCSC suggests that established thinking around password creation is flawed, because it expects the end-user (us) to memorise numerous lengthy passwords.
Instead of taking this approach, it may make more sense to instead opt for three ‘random’ words – strong enough to work on many different platforms, and to not be guessed by aspiring hackers – but not so obscure that you can’t remember them, either!
The strategy is informed by real-world customer behaviour, making it a little more grounded and practical in scope.
Key areas to consider with this approach include:
Of course, no password solution is entirely failsafe. There is always the possibility this approach could be seen as weaker than completely randomised password approaches, though the NCSC argues this is not entirely true.
Instead, the randomisation and length of the passwords could in fact be considerably stronger and more targeted than some passwords that are traditionally considered as efficient, but are actually incredibly easy to guess and exploit.
To find out more about the topic, head for the official National Cyber Security Centre website. Get practical help with your cybersecurity by contacting our expert team.
