Empowering IT Support to Deliver Efficiency, Reliability, and Satisfaction Across Every Interaction
As they say, what gets measured, gets managed. Well at Network Right we believe that what gets documented, gets done. Proper IT documentation is vital to an organization and helping scale efficiently. Documentation helps in numerous ways from prepping new hires to automating certain workflows. That said, here’s a look at what we believe the company’s IT department should have in mind when building out documentation & furthermore what we can help implement across our clientele that in turn helps the organization as a whole.
In the world of IT when describing or illustrating an issue it’s easy to get too complex or technical. Furthermore assuming a user has previous knowledge of what may be considered basic is never safe to assume. Rather aim to always keep it as simple as possible. Over simplify while avoiding being over-detailed. Whether you’re illustrating how users access something, a common fix to a technical problem, or what have you. Keep it simple in your approach to explaining steps & procedures. There’s time and place for more technical/detailed documentation but as a general rule of thumb simple is safe.
Often documentation is made up of text-based content. Write-ups, lists, steps, and so on. However nowadays and especially in the IT field, it’s a visual medium. Taking advantage of screenshots, images, even videos are great ways to make your documentation stand out! It’s easier to highlight in a picture a specific button that a user needs to click versus describing in the text. Furthermore, with markup & annotation tools you can really take your documentation to the next level.
Great IT documentation always takes into consideration that there are variables in certain scenarios. So we combat this by offering a failsafe method to redirect users to either helpdesk or a method of contact when users get stuck or something occurs that falls outside the instructions.
Examples:
ie) If you have any issues amidst this process feel free to contact helpdesk@networkright.io for further assistance
Take into account in certain situations a fix or problem outlined in a document may not always resolve the issue or unknown variables may come into play. So playing these scenarios out are always a great way to improve documentation. Taking and if this happens, then try this approach. Plotting out as many possible scenarios helps users move along seamlessly.
If IT issues occur often enough it’s a clear sign to document & automate. We often look at common help desk issues across our clientele & ask ourselves what occurs frequently enough that we don’t have documented.
These are just a few examples we’ve seen & created documentation around in order to quickly have reference material for employees to access quickly & efficiently. This not only helps employees have better access to potential solutions & troubleshooting steps but it also helps free up technicians’ time. Documentation can serve as the first line of defense when resolving issues before it needs to escalate for further support. Common tasks & issues with set solutions are the perfect ones to document as they never change.
Even more important than the documentation itself is the accessibility of it. Ensuring your team can easily access links or resources in which your documentation lives is key. Consider the platform in which you plan to house your documentation and how you can make access to it as convenient as possible.
Remembering that documentation goes both ways on the IT front. Keeping in mind while it’s great to have documents for new employees, common issues, and so on it’s equally as important to have internal documentation for the IT department as a whole. At Network Right we create internal documentation for all our clients so that in the event a technician has to fill in for an account they have complete visibility to how a client’s app-stack & workflows operate.
This allows IT to create a bit more detailed/in-depth documentation to show certain ins & out of a client system. Internal documentation is key to helping scale IT infrastructure & teams. Ensuring your organization has both its internal and external facing is a big step to building out your IT documentation.
Following the tips and policies above will help your organization strengthen your IT team’s documentation and ensure that your employees are set up for success! If your looking to get help with your companies documentation process & overall setup on the IT side don’t hesitate to reach out today at hello@networkright.com
Even outside of the remote environment and times we’re in security is always vital to an IT infrastructure in terms of ensuring it’s up to date & maintained appropriately. While we’ve certainly seen a spike in security concerns amidst this whole work-from-home culture we always suggest reviewing your IT’s security policies and looking for ways to improve. Ultimately the goal is to secure your environment from data, employee access, and so on. All while finding a balance of convenience and having your user base understand the importance of said policies.
Here are some of our top recommendations to look to put in place across your organization’s IT stack.
Enforcing a security measure known as 2FA (2-factor authentication, multi-factor, 2-step verification) does as the name implies. It adds a 2nd hurdle when logging into specific apps under certain circumstances. A common use case would be when an employee signs in to your G-Suite inbox for example from a personal laptop or a location they don’t commonly sign in from (let’s say while on vacation) the app will prompt for a code that’s generated via an app or texted to their cell phones. This randomly generated code serves as a 2nd password of sorts to verify you are who you claim to be.
Many apps nowadays allow for this feature to be enabled and in some cases enforced. Such as:
To name but a few, this tremendously helps with preventing unwarranted access to an account. As if the intruder gets access to your password they’d still need the 2FA method to verify access. Making it one of the most secure methods to help lock down accounts. We suggest setting up some sort of enforcement policy for major apps such as G-Suite in order to get everyone enrolled. Many apps offer multiple ways to store said 2FA keys making it easier than ever for end-users to manage.
You’d be surprised the number of passwords left as something simple for convenience sake, written on post-it notes at a user’s desk, and so on. Given these are the first barrier of entry to accounts & even company hardware it’s important to have security policies in place to protect passwords across the organization.
Here are a few of our tips:
Meaning users need to ensure the password they use is up to par or that apps enforce said requirements. Certain character length, complexity (Letters & symbols), and so on.
We’ve often seen this with networks that were set up without IT’s involvement where certain settings or configurations just lead to potential risks down the road. Given that your network has the potential to provide access to any on-premise devices (servers, network drives, user devices) it’s important to ensure your team has properly configured your setup to have security in mind.
We suggest checking the following:
A big one some companies may not consider especially early on as they build out their fleet of devices (be it mobile or desktops/laptops) is how they manage all of it. What do you do when an employee who has sensitive data on their machine has their device stolen or lost? This is where we recommend a mixture of systems to best prepare & manage these future issues
Another big part of what we help set up & manage for our clients is a tool known as an MDM. This allows us to help manage mobile devices be it iPads, Android phones, or even Macs & PC’s. This lets us set up tools to provision them out the box but most importantly do a couple of things from a security standpoint.
All in all MDM’s are great tools that serve multiple purposes but one of the biggest hands down is improving security & inventory management needs for companies.
These are but a few of the tips & policies we’ve helped implement in our client’s workflow & stack of tools. However there all vital nonetheless to ensuring your team & their data are safe. Security while sometimes coming at a cost or inconvenience for an end-user is for the greater good. As your company begins to scale, prep for compliance, and so on it should always be something you’re ensuring you update to date & following the best practices.
If there’s anything mentioned in the article your team/company wants help implementing in your environment, don’t hesitate to reach out to hello@networkright.com for more info!
Much like the world at large, the team at Network Right was faced with tackling the transition to a completely remote workforce. Not just for our internal team but our clientele. As an IT provider, we are thankfully in an industry more prepared than most for said environments. Nonetheless, we had to look at the most common issues companies would face in this movement from the IT side & how we can help combat it using the proper tools, policies, and planning at scale.
Much like the world at large, the team at Network Right was faced with tackling the transition to a completely remote workforce. Not just for our internal team but our clientele. As an IT provider, we are thankfully in an industry more prepared than most for said environments. Nonetheless, we had to look at the most common issues companies would face in this movement from the IT side & how we can help combat it using the proper tools, policies, and planning at scale.
Arguable the AV space saw the biggest jump in our remote work transition. Many clients who had conference room solutions while in the office had to prepare their teams for fully communicating via popular apps like Zoom, Microsoft Teams, Google Meet & more.
As such we make sure to work with our current & new clientele to ensure they had the appropriate software & plans in place to best support their workforce. With the increase in virtual events, we worked with department managers, assistants, and office managers alike to ensure the tools they used allowed them to easily host events that fit their criteria. For example, setting up Zoom accounts for companies and ensuring they had features such as breakout rooms, webinars, and licensed accounts for all their teams hosting calls longer than 40 minutes.
Staying in the touch with the team at this time is more important than ever. So we worked with our clientele to be sure their software stack met their needs to keep their employees in touch despite the remote times.
The other major concern for companies was the move from a corporate network to employees being on individual home connections. Security & accessibility is the most important aspect here.
VPN: Virtual Private Networks was one of the first things we worked with our clients to ensure they had some sort of solution available to help secure their employee’s traffic. VPN allows the user traffic to be tunneled safely when browsing & transferring data over networks especially that of the home where IT doesn’t have any administration. Furthermore, for clients with on-prem hardware (Servers, Data Storage, etc) at offices, we got VPNs configured at the network level to allow employees to connect as if they were at the office. This allows employees to access data and environments that they normally would on the corporate network.
Cost Savings: Given most offices went on pause we worked with both our clients & ISP partners to see where we could help save on costs. With no internet being used in some spaces where contracts permitted we worked to reduce cost & implement temporary savings.
Remote Monitoring: Having some level of visibility on the corporate network was still important for a lot of our clients. Whether it was on-prem devices or to ensure empty offices were secure we worked with those who didn’t have enterprise-grade equipment to implement hardware that allows our team to monitor any network drops, status, and various other information. Giving clients a sense of safety & visibility despite being out of the office.
One of the biggest hurdles faced was that of the transition to on/offboarding in these remote times from an IT perspective. We worked closely with HR departments to ensure we could have a plan in place for the remote work situation.
These are just some of the few ways we adjusted or implemented certain tools into some of our clients to ensure they were prepared & could handle the transition of onsite to remote hiring/offboarding in a way that’s efficient for all parties involved. While keeping IT security & employee satisfaction at the forefront.
The post-pandemic world saw a huge spike in phishing attempts across the year. As more and more people began to work from the home, the physical disconnect could at times make these spam/phishing attempts more susceptible to succeeding in their nature. As we saw the increase globally we did our best to ensure our clients were prepared.
This area was all about communication & being proactive to spot the troubles that would arise globally as a result of the remote workforce. Further how we in IT could help secure our customers & their data as well as educating the employees in such matters.
Lastly and most importantly we wanted to ensure that communication to our internal IT help-desk team was efficient, easy, and humane. We know that being outside the office and no direct communication can often leave problems left unchecked, urgent issues maybe not get flagged, and so on. Helpdesk being one of the leading services we provide, we wanted to be 110% certain in the transition existing clients didn’t lose the on-site white glove experience and that new clients felt our team was apart of there’s despite the remote times.
We achieved this in the following ways:
Communication is key in our field. Just as we offer our on-site service we wanted to ensure our remote presence was also felt if not physically at least digitally. We plan to continue to support all our client’s present & hopefully future ones for as long as these times or hybrid setups exist. While we enjoy the face-to-face connection at client sites we want to be able to safely & efficiently continue to offer our level of services regardless of conditions.
We hope to someday serve you as well! Be sure to reach out to our team if any of the above are issues your team may be facing & want to see how we at Network Right may be able to assist!
Mobile Device Management, or MDM, is the term used in reference to managing your fleet of devices corporate-owned devices, from both hardware and software perspectives. An MDM allows your team or IT department to do a multitude of things. As an MDM admin, you have the ability to conduct inventory on all devices, like laptops or mobile devices purchased. You’re also able to push updates remotely, wipe/lock devices in the event they’re stolen, and much more. Whether you’re a school district deploying hundreds of tablets or a workforce with 100+ laptops deployed to employees, an MDM can be the perfect solution for your organization.
The reason that this is important above all is it gives you visibility and management over your companies’ fleet of devices, effortlessly. It ensures all assets are in one place, while also giving you practical control over how you want your IT environment to be set up. MDM helps roll out policies that make companies, and in turn, their employees, more secure and efficient. To better understand why you would want an MDM implemented, we must dive more in-depth as to what they can do. While there are many MDM solutions out there, they all tend to offer these basic arrays of features and capabilities.
This, among many other things, are just a small part of what MDM’s are capable of. Above all, they help streamline processes, and in turn, save time, money, and hassle across the board from your HR to finance and IT teams.
With how robust and powerful an MDM can be, it’s important to also understand how they work to provide peace of mind to both the users and teams’. While every MDM varies at the technical level, a majority are based on the same foundation. The MDM provider installs an agent and/or a device profile on the device. That agent can be manually installed by your admin, enforced during users’ enrollment, or automated from the purchase point. Once that agent is installed. it adopts a profile set by your admin, which then periodically checks into the MDM software to ensure policies are deployed properly and the profile is up to date. So, for example, if your company decides they need to roll out Zoom company-wide, your MDM admin can simply add that app to the company-wide profile on the MDM and push it out to remotely install as soon as a connection to the internet has been made on each device.
On top of that, it can do this via a secure connection to ensure all data is protected along the way. The device and profile information is then stored on your MDM provider’s servers for you to access and whomever else you grant access to. The users don’t see anyone else’s device or have access to the MDM’s dashboard.
Like most software, MDM prices will vary depending on what is needed and features are being requested. Most usually charge you at per device rate either monthly or annually.
At the end of the day, it’s worth asking yourself:
-What features do I need out of an MDM?
-How many devices do we have?
-Will the time saved from an MDM make up for the cost of it in itself?
Definitely! It’s important to know what platforms they support, what their technical support is like, and if will do all the things you need it to do. All in all, an MDM can be a solution to multiple problems that many organizations face. Problems such as inventory management, security updates, compliance, onboarding, offboarding, and more. With that being said, here’s a preview of some of the top MDM providers Network Right recommends.
Apple Based MDM Providers
Cross-Platform MDM Providers
If you or your company is interested in implementing an MDM solution, please reach out to us at hello@networkright.io and we’d be happy to help!
October marks the start of Cyber Security Awareness month so there’s no better time to revisit some common security tips & practices! At a time where many are in remote or work-from-home environments, it’s important to help protect your workforce, assets, and data.
One of those common attack vectors despite being the most common can be the most effective, phishing. Phishing is the act of pretending or falsifying information in order to get the recipient to reveal sensitive data such as banking, company info, credentials, and so on. While this commonly gets bundled as spam email it’s worth noting that phishing attacks nowadays can be complex & surpass certain spam filters. So here are some tips from the Network Right team to help protect yourself & your employees when it comes to Phishing attacks.
A very common rule when it comes to email phishing attempts is to do a twice-over of all the details of the emails. Noticeable things such as :
That said it’s worth being aware that there’s such thing as domain spoofing. This is where the spammer in question can pretend to be a part of your domain user@domain.com. Making it hard to 100% tell if the email is legitimate or not. While IT admins can do things to help prevent these (Such as implementing filters in G-Suite & so on) it’s always a chance for spammers to leverage this. It’s best for the IT department to preemptive about this and ensures most filters or security policies are in place before any phishing attacks. However, for users knowing this is possible in the first place is the most important step so you can be aware of it.
Often a common attack method is to pretend to be a service or app users may use or be the admin of & attempt to contact users & urge them to change certain credentials or add billing info.
Always be aware of any email in which a company asks you to confirm billing info such as credit cards, reset your password when you didn’t manually request it, and so on. While there are legitimate ways to get these emails it’s always a safe bet if your unsure to go to the site directly & change such info versus clicking a link in an email especially when it’s unwarranted or disguised in an email telling you that its urgent to do so.
While spammers get email addresses from a variety of methods it never hurts to be cautious of whom & what services you give your email to. Often times we’ve seen even legitimate companies have info leaked where users’ emails get out to the public & thus added to these lists that end up spamming users. So while it’s at times unavoidable always do your best to be aware of what services you sign up for.
In the event, you or your employee fall victim to a phishing attack these are some ways you can better prepare & react to when it occurs.
Given the climate we’ve been in for the majority of 2020 security is more important than ever when it comes to Infosec/IT. Seeing as employees may be working from home or outside networks is more important than ever to practice implement certain measures to help secure your employees & your company data. Here are some ways we at Network Right recommend & help implement across our clientele in these remote times.
One of the most common ways of protecting your employees at home is to implement some sort of VPN. A VPN helps encrypt your employee’s data across the internet & secure all information that’s transferred. This setup can be as simple as looking to integrate a solution such as OpenVPN or NordVPN for your team to help encrypt their traffic or going as far as implementing a full hardware/onsite equipment at the network level to have your employees connect just as if they were at the office. Enforcing certain rules such as only being able to access certain company resources or files while on said VPN.
A VPN is useful across many spectrums, it encrypts traffic end to end ensuring all work they do is secured whether they’re on public or home wi-fi. Given the amount of data we’re sending nowadays as well as the increased work from home, the internet as a resource is one that’s become very essential. How your employees connect & send data over the said connection is equally as important & why you may want to consider some level of VPN setup.
Commonly referred to as an MDM this tool comes in handy in a multitude of ways when it comes to protecting your employees. Not only does it let you track assets & push out updates/apps but it also lets you remote wipe computers in the event they’re lost or stolen.
This is important because given the remote climate laptops may be more vulnerable to accidental damage or even theft. Ensuring your team has an MDM in place allows IT to remotely wipe the machine or even go as far as to track it. Popular MDM’s like JAMF for Mac or InTune for Windows allows all sorts of controls over your companies fleet of machines & is an investment worthwhile from productivity to security in this remote climate.
A security measure we commonly put in place for our clients is 2FA or some level of multi-factor authentication. This feature ensures that there are at least two methods of verification when logging into an account. So for example outside of entering your companies email password, you would be prompted for a code that’s texted to your phone. This creates a second step to login into the account, so in the event, someone compromised your password to a critical login there’s a backup. 2FA is flexible & can be triggered for example only when you log into an account for the first time on a new device or a different location.
While it may not be as common in a work from home setting you can invest in physical security procedures to help your remote workforce stay safe & protect their hardware. While some of these implementations may be over the top for certain setups we understand that different companies have certain data protection policies in place & protecting that asset is a top priority. So here are some methods to do just that.
Thus why now more than ever as employees are a mix of work or personal machines, accessing accounts on home networks, and from a nontypical location, 2FA is vital to securing account access. Ensuring outside parties can’t get in even with access to a user’s password or account off the bat.
With the remote workforce at an all-time unfortunately so are scams. Nefarious parties trying to get people to log in to fake portals, compromise sensitive data, or just outright gain access to company hardware all amidst these work from home times. This is why it’s important for you to keep your employees up to date & remind them of proper phishing/spam hygiene. Sending out information & resources to ensure they avoid said scams they may get via e-mails and what not while working from home.
Tips such as:
As time goes on in this work from the home state, there will always unfortunately be those trying to exploit said times. So doing your best to keep your team informed & aware is a key step!
On that same token ensuring not just the physical but digital aspect of your employee’s machines is protected is vital. While we may not always be able to control the environment in which an employee connects to a secured network or user behavior we can help prevent attacks through Anti-Virus or Endpoint management deployment. Deploying anti-virus/malware software like Sophos, Malware Bytes, and many others allow us to remotely scan assets & ensure no nefarious programs or software has infected the systems. It also helps prevent users from accidentally getting exposed to scams or malicious downloads. Remote or not it’s a good practice to deploy some form of endpoint protection to your fleet & there’s no better time than now to ensure company data is protected at the digital level.
At the end of the day, everyone has different living situations. That said though the climate we’re in may not be optimal, it doesn’t mean there aren’t things we can do to help protect our employees & the companies data. Whether it be a home network or users on personal devices there are always ways to help secure & make it a safer & seamless experience for your workforce in these already difficult times. These are just some of the many steps you can take to further protect your remote workforce. At Network Right we help ensure our clients & their team are secure & safe amidst this work-from-home period. As in keeping them safe, we help protect the company’s valuable assets & allow them to continue their work efficiently.
Reach out today if you are interested in implementing any or all of the above at your company today to help everyone be more safe & secure in these already difficult work-from-home times.
