One of the biggest responsibilities for our IT consulting company near Boston is keeping IT networks secure. Whether it’s a few PCs or hundreds on your IT network, there’s one thing that can separate your system from being compromised: a great password.

Why? Hackers want access to anything and everything. If they can guess your user name and password, you might as well have given them your wallet and the keys to your building.

Before we talk about what makes a good password, let’s begin with the first of five things to know and practice in using passwords.

1. Don’t be complacent: Attacks can and do happen.

Hackers are a devious bunch and will stop at nothing to get into your network and files. They use three different methods to get to you: brute force, dictionary attacks, and social engineering. (more…)

Like most of our customers who use our IT support services, you’ve probably come to rely on electronic communication to run your business. It’s more convenient. It’s faster and it’s easy to attach documents and records to your emails to share them with others.

But how secure is that email you sent to your clients? Or that financial packet you emailed to the auditors or state agencies or Financial Regulators? Did you attach a spreadsheet with financial data – or include your employees’ private data?

That’s why email security and encryption services should be at the top your IT planning for the future, and Internet & Telephone is ready to lead the way. Call us today to find out how easy it is to add secure email encryption to your existing email.

One of the defining cultural characteristics of Internet & Telephone is our focus on Professional Development.  In order to deliver first class service to our customers, it is critically important that our Engineers remain at the forefront of the latest technology.  We also know that in order to retain the best and brightest talent, our company must align itself with the personal career goals of our employee.  The contribution has to go both ways:  Our employees drive our success, and we give them the tools to do so.

So when our lead Microsoft Engineer, John Gagnon, traveled to California last week to attend a Cisco bootcamp, our whole team was pulling for him.  It’s considered extremely rare for an Engineer to attend a week-long bootcamp, absorb an entire week’s worth of information, and then successfully pass the Certification exam all in the same stint. In fact, it’s considered so rare that the boot camp instructor virtually guaranteed that nobody from the class would be able to do it. But guess what – he was wrong!

And the whole team was waiting to celebrate when John returned victorious, with his Cisco Certified Network Associate’s cert in hand! Break out the cake and beer!

Learn about the new regulatory environment and what you should do to ensure that your small business is compliant.

A new regulatory environment is affecting the business landscape, and compliance standards such as Sarbanes Oxley (SOX) and HIPAA require businesses to adhere to enforceable standards set by the government. Many compliance standards require accountability on the part of businesses, especially in the areas of data integrity, security, and privacy. Small businesses, especially in the financial and healthcare sectors or those that handle contracts from businesses in these sectors or from government agencies, are more likely to be affected by a more stringent regulatory environment. (more…)