Microsoft 365 Business Part 2: Azure Active Directory Azure Active Directory (“Azure AD”) replaces a traditional physical Active Directory domain server (AD DS), allowing you to subscribe to it as a fully packaged service (PaaS) with no hardware and software expenditure upfront, no ongoing maintenance, and no backup and disaster recovery expense. Azure Active Directory (“Azure AD”) comes in four editions—Free, Basic, Premium P1, and Premium P2. The Free edition is included in your…

Microsoft 365 Business: Part 1 As a member of the Microsoft Partner Network, we will explain the benefits, tools, and solutions that Microsoft 365 Business offers. This will be a 3-part blog series to educate and provide support with Microsoft 365 Business. What is Microsoft 365 Business? Microsoft 365 Business is a “platform-as-a-service” (PaaS) hosted, maintained, secured, and backed up by Microsoft Corporation across geographically redundant data centers. It provides an entire ecosystem of…

Cybersecurity Campaign Playbook Harvard Kennedy School’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs has created the Cybersecurity Campaign Playbook This PDF was designed to give political campaigns simple, actionable information that will make a political campaign’s information more secure from adversaries trying to attack their organization—and our democracy. Written by a bipartisan team of experts in cybersecurity, politics and law, the Cybersecurity Campaign Playbook provides simple, actionable ways of countering the growing cyber threat in…

Five Office 365 Apps You Should Be Using If you are a daily user of Microsoft Office 365, you probably know your way around Word, Excel, & PowerPoint. Here are five other apps Office 365 offers that are very beneficial, but not as well known. Flow Microsoft Flow allows users to create automated workflows between your favorite apps and services to get notifications, syncronize files, collect data and more. Flow has dozens of premade templates…

Sophisticated Phishing Impersonation Techniques on the Rise According to a recent report from helpnetsecurity.com, three main areas of cyberattacks are on the rise in 2019. HTTPS encryption in URL-based attacks, spoofed (Spear) phishing attempts, and cloud-based attacks focused on publicly hosted trusted file-sharing services. This data was compiled after 1.3 billion emails were analyzed. 1. HTTPS in URL based attacks climbed 26% In Q1 2019 a 26% quarter-over-quarter increase in malicious URLs using HTTPS and…

To address these new threats and the gaps in security for our clients, our Cybersecurity team has developed the CORE Security Program (Cyber Operation Response & Engineering). CORE was developed to bring our clients up to an acceptable level of defense using defense in depth and by leveraging people, processes and technology. It is designed to provide the visibility we need to create an audit trail in the event of an attack. As part of this…

As part of the MITS (Managed IT Services), we provide our clients with a basic level of incident response and recovery for cybersecurity issues. Many of our clients are asking “what happened” after an incident but, in most cases, we cannot answer that question because we simply do not have a proper cybersecurity program in place to audit the threat. Many firms are unaware that their network has been breached or infiltrated until they notice…