telanova Blog

telanova: the outsourced IT team that feels like your own

Providing advice, consultancy, helpdesk, monitoring and maintenance, updates, upgrades, security: all the things your in-house team would do, but better and at a fraction of the cost and hassle.

How much damage could a colleague do accidentally or deliberately?

A criminal offered a Tesla employee a million dollars to run a program on his work computer. Luckily for Tesla, they reported it and Tesla worked with the authorities to catch the baddies. If the employee had run that program, Tesla likely would have been held to ransom, had their intellectual property stolen etc.

This is a high profile case against a huge organisation, but it is a sign of things to come and will trickle down to small and medium businesses.

Businesses need to protect their IT from employees in other, more ordinary circumstances, eg:

  • Deleting everything in their email mailbox before they leave because they honestly believe it’s right thing to do
  • Deleting information if they are sacked or about to be
  • Stealing information from the business before they leave a company
  • Access systems after they have left the company

Small businesses are especially vulnerable as many give all employees access to almost everything. One of the best steps any business can take is to adopt a “Principle of Least Privilege”. Each employee has the minimum access to perform their job and nothing more. A good place to start is:

  • Remove admin rights on devices
  • Remove admin rights on cloud/web services
  • Limit access within line of business applications
  • Structure files/folders and limit access

At telanova, we are experts at making sure employees can access what they need to do their job, while limiting access to everything else. Engage telanova as your IT team and we will secure your systems.

Consider blocking USB sticks in your organisation

What would you, or your most trusting colleague do on finding a USB stick in your car park? Would you try and find the owner? Perhaps plug it in and take a look?

One tactic hackers use against valuable targets such as accountants, lawyers, architects, etc is to “drop” a malicious USB stick in their car park. There is a good chance a well meaning employee will plug it in and poke around to try and identify whose it is. Now the hacker has bypassed multiple layers of security and usually the only one left is the antivirus. If that doesn’t catch what’s on the stick then they’re in!

The hacker will then steal your information, attempt bank transfer fraud, encrypt all your information so you can’t access it and hold you to ransom.

Unrestricted USB sticks carry other risks too:

  • Unencrypted personal data could violate data protection legislation leading to fines, disqualification etc
  • A malicious employee can steal data with no/little trace
  • Booby trapped USB devices such as the USB Killer
  • Employee time wasting

So, what can you do? For most organisations, cloud storage such as OneDrive or Dropbox can simply replace USB sticks and then you can block USB sticks outright. If your organisation has some niche need for them, then Microsoft Intune has fine grained permissions - e.g. allow particular employees/devices/usb sticks, while blocking the rest.

Engage telanova to implement security measures appropriate for your organization.

Do I need more memory or more storage?

Have you heard someone say “My computer’s running slow, I need to delete something”?

They’ve probably confused storage with memory.

A PC might have 8 GB of memory and 500 GB of hard disk storage. Both are described in the same units - gigabytes, but notice the very different quantities.

Memory (or RAM) affects how many different things the computer can process at the same time - basically how many apps you can have open at the same time.

Storage (or hard disk space) affects how many documents, photos, music etc you can save.

Unless your hard disk is completely full, deleting things will not speed up your computer. But if you have a lot of apps open, closing some might.

In a business environment it does not make sense to try and sort these things out yourself, you’ll spend time, money and energy on the wrong solutions to your difficulty. Instead, engage telanova as your IT team.

Why would I need a powerful computer?

A common misconception from businesses that only use web applications is that they don’t need powerful computers. It’s not true!

  • Many websites actually run code directly on your computer, some examples are: Salesforce, Google Mail / Docs. A powerful processor will speed these up.
  • The number of web browser tabs you can have open at the same time is affected by the amount of memory you have.
  • Zoom, Teams and other collaboration tools need powerful computers.
  • Startup, Shutdown, and Restart will waste working time if the processor and disk is too slow.

A good starting point is

  • Intel i5 / Ryzen 5 CPU
  • 8GB RAM
  • 256GB SSD

In a business environment, it does not make sense to analyse everyone's requirements and decide on a suitable model yourself, you’ll spend time, money and energy on the wrong solution. Instead, engage telanova as your IT team.

Demonstrate to your clients you have adequate cyber protection

Most people understand how to physically secure their organisation, locks on the doors and windows, burglar alarm, security camera's etc. But most people don't understand cyber security, how do you make sure the protections you have in place are sufficient? How do you demonstrate that to your clients?

Cyber Essentials is a simple but effective, government-backed certification scheme that will reassure you and your customers that you are following best practices and have adequate protections in place. It only costs £300 and also includes cyber insurance.

We’ve done it ourselves, click here and search for telanova for proof. We've also guided several of our customers through the process, getting up to the standard and passing the certification.

If you would like to talk about how we can help your business pass the Cyber Essentials certification please get in touch.

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