Month: February 2020

In todays world, solutions are advancing and the times of on premise hardware are beginning to fade. Cloud solutions are starting to make a significant impact on today’s enterprise environments. Having an always available solution such as Hybrid Cloud is key for most businesses these days, giving you and your employees constant access to their data and environments .

What is Hybrid Cloud?

Hybrid Cloud is a cloud computing environment that uses a mix of on-premise, private and third party, public cloud services with communication between the platforms. Your business gets great flexibility and far more data deployment options by allowing workloads to migrate between private and public clouds, hence saving you money as your needs shift and your costs increase.

What Hybrid Cloud Allows us to do?

Hybrid cloud has multiple benefits that will have a positive impact on your business’s productivity and profitability.

• Data Processing: By using highly scalable cloud resources, you can run big data analytics software , while also using private cloud to guarantee security and keep sensitive data safe behind your firewall
• Separation: Separate sensitive data on your private cloud and use the public cloud to run the rest of your business
• Time: Moving to the cloud can be destabilising for the daily operations of your business, by putting some of your workloads on a public cloud or on a small-scale private cloud you can see what works for your business, and then continue to expand either your public cloud, private cloud or a mixture of both
• Temporary processing: Hybrid cloud will allow you to allocate public cloud resources for short-term projects. This is more cost-effective than investing in your own data centre’s IT infrastructure
• Flexibility: As your business develops, scales up or down and changes, you need to be flexible. Hybrid cloud allows you to match your data management requirements to the public cloud, private cloud or on-premise resources that are best to handle them

Cloud (Part of Hybrid Cloud).

Hybrid cloud, as the name suggests is a mixture of different cloud systems, here’s a list of them:

• Private Cloud: A private cloud is usually defined as everything behind a business wall. These systems typically operate in house data centres
• Public Cloud: The public cloud includes a whole host of services and companies. The most common are Azure, AWS but you can also include Microsoft Office 365
• Hybrid Cloud: A hybrid cloud is typically a combination of both private cloud and public cloud. In a hybrid cloud environment, the private and public services are integrated with each other
• Multi-Cloud: Multi-Cloud strategy is an approach that operates any of the above. An organisation may have multiple public and private clouds of multiple hybrid clouds part of their IT network, all either connected or not

Infrastructure(Part of Hybrid Cloud).

As you adopt Hybrid Cloud services you will require the availability of:

• A public IaaS (Infrastructure as a service) platform, such as Microsoft Azure
• The construction of a private cloud, it can be on premise hosted on your own server or hosted through a third party cloud provider
• And a wide area network (WAN) connection between those environments mentioned above

Conclusion: Hybrid Cloud: What can it do for you?

In conclusion, having a hybrid cloud solution is key for the future, as needs grow for you and your business. Off loading your systems from the back processing and even VMs that you have in house and putting them onto the cloud will help you and your staff with availability, productivity and therefore profitability.

If you have any question on how to implement Hybrid cloud to your IT infrastructure, please don’t hesitate to contact us, we can help.

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In todays world, cyber security is as important as ever. With ever growing threats to businesses, having a robust security solution is absolutely essential.

We’ve all heard of enterprises paying huge fines or even going out of business because of a simple hack to their systems. There are simply far too many threats out there to ignore the risks – from ransomware to phishing, it could cost you your livelihood. Prevention is key and in this article we’ll show you 10 Ways to Prevent Cyber Attacks and how to safeguard your business effectively.

What is a Cyber Attack?

A cyber attack is a deliberate exploitation of your systems and/or network. Cyber attacks use malicious code to compromise your computer, logic or data and steal, leak or hold your data hostage. Cyber attack prevention is essential for every business and organisation.

Here are some examples of common cyber attacks and types of data breaches:

• Identity theft, fraud, extortion
• Malware, phishing, spamming, spoofing, spyware, trojans and viruses
• Stolen hardware, such as laptops or mobile devices
• Denial-of-service and distributed denial-of-service attacks
• Breach of access
• Password sniffing
• System infiltration
• Website defacement
• Private and public Web browser exploits
• Instant messaging abuse
• Intellectual property (IP) theft or unauthorized access

1. Train your staff.

One of the most common ways cyber criminals get access to your data is through your employees. They’ll send fraudulent emails impersonating someone in your organisation and will either ask for personal details or for access to certain files. Links often seem legitimate to an untrained eye and it’s easy to fall into the trap. This is why employee awareness is vital.

One of the most efficient ways to protect against cyber attacks and all types of data breaches is to train your employees on cyber attack prevention and inform them of current cyber attacks.

They need to:

• Check links before clicking them 
• Check email addresses from the received email (have a look here on how to check it)
• Use common sense before sending sensitive information. If a request seems odd, it probably is. It’s better to
  check via a phone call with the person in question before actioning the “request”

Leaf can provide bespoke cyber awareness training for organisations of all sizes. Contact us to find out more.

2. Keep your software and systems fully up to date.

Often cyber attacks happen because your systems or software aren’t fully up to date, leaving weaknesses. So cybercriminals exploit these weaknesses to gain access to your network. Once they are in – it’s often too late to take preventative action.

To counteract this, it’s smart to invest in a patch management system that will manage all software and system updates, keeping your system resilient and up to date.

Leaf offer patch management as part of their managed security solution.

3. Ensure Endpoint Protection.

Endpoint protection protects networks that are remotely bridged to devices. Mobile devices, tablets and laptops that are connected to corporate networks give access paths to security threats. These paths need protected with specific endpoint protection software.

4. Install a Firewall.

There are so many different types of sophisticated data breaches and new ones surface every day and even make comebacks.

Putting your network behind a firewall is one of the most effective ways to defend yourself from any cyber attack. A firewall system will block any brute force attacks made on your network and/or systems before it can do any damage, something we can help you with.

5. Backup your data.

In the event of a disaster (often a cyber attack) you must have your data backed up to avoid serious downtime, loss of data and serious financial loss.

6. Control access to your systems.

Believe it or not, one of the attacks that you can receive on your systems can be physical, having control over who can access your network is really really important. Somebody can simply walk into your office or enterprise and plug in a USB key containing infected files into one of your computers allowing them access to your entire network or infect it.

It’s essential to control who has access to your computers. Having a perimeter security system installed is a very good way to stop cybercrime as much as break ins!

7. Wifi Security.

Who doesn’t have a wifi enabled device in 2020? And that’s exactly the danger, any device can get infected by connecting to a network, if this infected device then connects to your business network your entire system is at serious risk.

Securing your wifi networks and hiding them is one of the safest things you can do for you systems. With wireless technology developing more and more everyday there’s thousands of devices that can connect to your network and compromise you.

8. Employee personal accounts.

Every employee needs their own login for every application and program. Several users connecting under the same credentials can put your business at risk.

Having separate logins for each staff member will help you reduce the number of attack fronts. Users only log in once each day and will only use their own set of logins. Greater security isn’t the only benefit, you’ll also get improved usability.

9. Access Management.

One of the risks as a business owner and having employees, is them installing software on business owned devices that could compromise your systems.

Having managed admin rights and blocking your staff installing or even accessing certain data on your network is beneficial to your security. It’s your business, protect it!

10. Passwords.

Having the same password setup for everything can be dangerous. Once a hacker figures out your password, they now have access to everything in your system and any application you use.

Having different passwords setup for every application you use is a real benefit to your security, and changing them often will maintain a high level of protection against external and internal threats.

Find out more about good password practice here.

Conclusion: 10 Ways to Prevent Cyber Attacks.

It can be difficult to know where to begin when it comes to protecting your business from cyber crime and cyber attacks. There’s so much information out there that it can become overwhelming, especially when the info is conflicting.

You need a solution that’s right for your business and your employees. Get in touch with us today for a no obligation cyber security assessment. We can help kickstart your journey to becoming secure.

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