MicroTech Systems IT Service Blog

It seems like every other day there’s a new headline about a company that has been hacked. In 2016, Yahoo announced that information from over 1 billion user accounts had been stolen in two separate incidents. 

As a small business, you may feel like you’re not a target for cybercriminals. You’re not as big as a Fortune 500 company, so why would anyone want to hack into your systems? The truth is, no one is immune to cyber-attacks. In fact, small businesses are quite popular targets for cybercriminals because they often don’t have the same security measures in place as larger businesses. That means that if you’re not prepared, you could risk losing everything – including your customers’ trust.

So how can you ensure your business is ready for anything a cybercriminal might throw your way?

Password management is a critical cybersecurity measure, but it’s also one of the most common weak points hackers can exploit to steal a small business’s data.  

We hear news about data breaches all the time. One misstep could lead to lost sales, a tarnished reputation, hefty regulatory penalties, or even closing your business for good.  

According to a 2020 survey, enterprises lost between 301,000 and 400,000 U.S. dollars per hour due to critical server outages. Not only economic strain, poor network monitoring leading to downtime can also reduce your reputation among customers. You can solve network issues while ensuring maximum efficiency of your network infrastructure by simply monitoring your network activity using reliable network monitoring systems.

Monitoring your network activity such as bandwidth usage, latency, uptime, connectivity, data packet loss, etc will help you detect network performance issues enabling you to proactively fix them before it affects your customers.  

We at MicroTech, have been providing network monitoring services for small and medium-sized businesses for over 50 years now. From our experience, we have realized that to implement an optimal network performance monitor plan, you need to understand what network monitoring is, why it is important, which metrics to track, and optimization techniques for network monitoring.

Let's dive into all these topics one by one. 

...and how to Avoid These IT Mistakes in 2019

No IT strategy is ever certain – business leaders make plenty of well-informed assumptions about the future of information technology, only to find out that the future takes a different turn. This year, everyone made plenty of assumptions about the cloud, the IoT, information security, and more. What did businesses get wrong – and how will we fix things in the year to come?

If you think your system and network are safe after installing a traditional antivirus software application, think again. Today, it's all about the exploit. Hackers are getting more creative. The workforce is more distributed than ever. And, small businesses need to be prepared.

For hackers, American small business culture represents a target-rich environment. Small businesses don’t often possess robust protocols in place to deter attackers. They might not use commercial-grade antivirus, and may not consistently employ strong password policies or two-factor authentication. 

As a result, attackers have a huge opportunity when it comes to small businesses – and it’s an opportunity that they usually take. Here are a few startling statistics as of 2021:

Many different types of businesses (and industries) rely on the support of trained specialists to ensure that IT and security infrastructure is up to speed. There are a variety of subcategories within the field of IT that require advanced training and expertise.

Small businesses underestimate cyber-attack protection believing in the false idea that cyber criminals only target large enterprises. In fact, the opposite is true. 

While the days of downloading new antivirus software from floppy disks or CDs are long gone, having up-to-date protection against cyber threats is still a very present reality. Even if the way we protect our computer systems looks different than it did in decades past, the need for protecting valuable data is more important than ever.