Blog

Things to consider if you are using a VPN

Wed, 27 Aug 2025 00:00:00 +0000

There has been a considerable uptake in VPN usage, ever since the online safety bill was brought into force.

A lot of websites started to require UK residents to verify their age before being able to access content, and the thing is, it is not just adult entertainment sites, it has also meant sites that hold content that should not be viewed by children, such as some news stories, or websites that have information about weaponry.

This new barrier to access sites meant a lot of people sought improvisation, including pretending not to be located in the UK through the use of a VPN that terminates in a different country, making the user appear to be browsing from that country, so the UK laws do not applying to them when connecting to the site.

A lot of people also do not like the idea of being tracked when visiting a website if they are from the UK, when users from other countries are not tracked, which is why there has been such a huge uptake in VPN usage.

But, one of the downsides of using a VPN, to appear as though you are from a different country, means that you can inadvertently be locked out of your work account. This is because a lot of organisations use geolocation checks to make sure no one can hack their services from overseas, because, as far as your work is concerned, you are in the UK. If someone appears to be logging into your work systems from the USA with your account, then it could automatically lock you out.

The same can be found with websites for your bank or financial services, as they too will use login pattern recognition to check where you are logging in from.

So, if you are using a VPN to bypass these online challenges, just be warned that could find yourself getting locked out of sites you were not expecting, and you then have to go through the tedious process of regaining access.

Why is it important to segment your network.

Wed, 20 Aug 2025 00:00:00 +0000

We live in a connected world, with more and more devices connecting to the internet. We would often think nothing of in terms of what these "smart" devices do. They just make our lives a little bit more convenient because we can control them from our phones.

These smart devices are grouped together into something called the Internet of Things (IoT), because they are bespoke devices that have one purpose, the following are a few examples of interconnected or smart devices:

Boilers and thermostats
CCTV cameras
Dishwasher
Doorbells
Smart plugs
Smart lights
Smart speakers
Smoke alarms

Pretty much everything new that is electronic is designed with interconnectivity in mind, even cars and washing machines these days.

Every time you unbox a new bit of tech, it often asks to be connected to the internet so it can communicate with an app on your smart phone.

A question to ask yourself is, can you remember every device that is connected to your network, after all, a lot of things may have been connected over a period of time and it is often easy to forget what has or has not been joined to your network.

Convenience has a price

These interconnected devices are designed for your convenience, but this convenience comes with a price, and that price is that it could be opening up your network with gaping security holes, after all, do you know what operating system these devices are using, what issues they have, could someone take control of any of these devices and if they can, they are now connected to a device on your network, which means they could use it as a means to attack other devices inside your network.

Segment your network

One of the best thing you can do, especially with a wireless network, is to segment it into different uses. Most people are familiar with a business wireless network and a guest wireless network, where the two are segmented. This allows guests to connect to the internet without compromising your network security.

Modern wireless networks often support multiple SSIDs, meaning you can have multiple wireless networks, each segmented and separate from each other, without having them being able to communicate between them, each having a logical security barrier between them whilst at the same time, sharing the same internet connection. This is done using something called network address translation (NAT), that allows different networks to share the same connection whilst being unable to see each other.

If you have a guest network, why not an IoT network?

If you are taking this much trouble to segment your network for security by having a guest network, why wouldn’t you do the same for all of the smart devices as well and give them their own secure, segmented network to use?

This is why it is sensible to have an Internet of Things (IoT) network, dedicated to these devices only, so that if one is compromised in terms of its security, someone exploiting it, won’t be able to do much, keeping your business computers and data secure.

If you would like help segmenting your wireless so that smart devices have their own network, give us a call on 01722 411 999

Time is running out, don't ignore this problem until it is too late

Wed, 13 Aug 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Two months left, that's all. Two months in order to prevent this security risk from occurring.

Windows 10 Support Ends In...

If you are still running on Windows 10, you only have two months until it goes out of support with Microsoft and becomes a security risk in your organisation if it is connected to the internet.

There have been some high profile security incidents where their security was compromised, most notably Marks & Spencer, the Co-op, Harrods, and HM Revenue and Customs (HMRC).

Did you know that small organisations that suffer a security breach mostly fail from the fallout. The reputational damage and loss of revenue is usually too much for an organisation to recover from.

Windows 10 code was used to create Windows 11, almost 90% of Windows 11 is based on Windows 10 code, so anything found in Windows 11 will most likely be a flaw in Windows 10 as well, however there will be no fix for the Windows 10 flaws, all the while hackers will be notified of these security issues by the fact that Windows 11 is being fixed!

Don't leave it all to the last minute, hoping all your applications will run on Windows 11 if they are not tested yet. Use the time between now and October 14th to move away from Windows 10 in a controlled and managed way.

So why risk your organisation, why become a statistic when the cost of upgrading or replacing Windows 10 is so small.

Call us on 01722 411 999 to discuss upgrade options.

Could you get back your data if it were deleted?

Wed, 06 Aug 2025 00:00:00 +0000

A recent survey found that the majority of businesses that use cloud services think their data is automatically backed up because it is stored in the cloud, and were shocked when they found out that it wasn’t. There appears to be a lot of confusion about what happens when your data is put in the cloud with regards to the data being backed up.

And whilst cloud infrastructure, like Microsoft 365, has built in redundancy and resilience, it doesn’t mean your data sitting there has the same levels of protection, so we will go through how cloud infrastructure works and the resilience that makes people think the data is safe, confusing replicas of data with it being backed up.

But before we go into how cloud service resilience works, here is a quick question to ask yourself...

If you needed to get a file back that was deleted six weeks ago, would you be able to?

The bulk of responders said yes, but here's the crunch, when asked how, they couldn't answer, assuming the cloud provider would be able to restore their data, which is incorrect. Unless you are specifically paying for a backup, you won't have one.

Cloud infrastructure has built in resilience but not built in backups.

Microsoft owns a lot of data centres scattered around the world, so they can service their customers and also accommodate geopolitical legislation, such as GDPR that requires data to be stored within a geographic location.

Microsoft creates three working copies of your data with a primary, secondary and tertiary replica of your environments. If you use Microsoft 365 in your organisation, each person's email, data and shared data will be replicated between three data centres concurrently, it is all kept in sync. If something changes in the primary site, it is written to the secondary and tertiary sites simultaneously, keeping everything fully replicated and in sync.

If the primary data centre is knocked out, let say by fire, then one of the replica sites is promoted to primary, and a new tertiary site is spawned and brought into replication in a new data centre to ensure continued continuity.

As a user you'll be completely unaware that this is going on in the background, it is done automatically.

It is because of this resilience that a lot of people often mistake this protection as being a form of backup, but it isn't, it is just resilience to keep you working should a critical part of the cloud infrastructure stop working.

This replication and resilience of your data is just for current data though, if you were to delete some of your information, it is gone, if you were to want to get it back a few weeks later, there is very little you can do if you do not have a backup. Whist some data can be recovered from the recycle bin, if you are lucky, it is not a safe or reliable way to operate and a backup is the only way to ensure your data is safe.

Another misconception that there is a built in backup of your data is that you can go back to a previous version of your file because there is a feature in Microsoft 365 that allows you to roll back through previous versions of the file, however this doesn't work if your file is deleted or corrupted, especially if this goes unnoticed for a period of time. AND... this just applies to your files, NOT your email.

Last question to ask yourself, how long could you business keep going without any data, without your customer information and contact details, without any email, without your financial information including invoices and who owes your business money, how long could you keep going, be honest with yourself, after all it is your business that is impacted if you lose all your data.

This is why it is so important to have a regular backup, with the retention period that fulfils your needs. Not all data falls into the same requirements, some data needs to be protected for longer in some organisations, especially regulated industries, like financial services or child protection services.

Backups are REALLY cost affective, they are pennies per gigabyte and they can really save your business's bacon if there were ever a need to get data back. And it is not just data stored in the cloud, it is data that is critical to your business regardless of its location. You may store your data on a single computer, but is it protected and how often?

The Silver Cloud Business provides backup solutions that fit all businesses needs and requirements, if it is physical servers, with the need to be able to bring them online instantly in the event of a failure, or users' computers, or data in cloud services, including email and directory services, our backup solution can accommodate it all.

If you would like to find out how much a backup would cost your business, call us on 01722 411 999.

Gone Phishing, catch you later

Wed, 30 Jul 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Did you know that cyber security incidents are so prevalent that one in two, yes, that’s right, half, or in other words, 50% of ALL businesses have suffered from a cyber-attack already. Some have experienced this multiple times, and it doesn’t matter what size your business is. It is a numbers game to the attackers. The bigger the organisation, the bigger the reward, but the hackers are happy to target smaller organisations with less security measures in place. Far better to successfully infiltrate 1000 small organisations and get them to pay ransoms than fail to hack 1 large organisation and get nothing.

What about the other half though? Do they have better security? May be, but it could also be that they have also suffered a security breach of some sort, but are blissfully unaware of it yet.

This information is from the UK Government's own survey on Cyber Crime, available to read here.

To make matters even more worrying, it's reported that last year, 83% of those questioned who are responsible for IT in businesses or organisation faced or dealt with at least one email security threat or incident. Again, most experienced multiple attacks because security threats are based on a numbers game, where malicious actors bank on a small number of emails getting through and causing an exploit from the millions sent out.

It costs very little to send out billions of emails across the world, it only needs a 0.1% success rate from a billion emails to result in 1,000,000 organisations being compromised. Think about it, only having a 0.1% success rate results in 1,000,000 compromised organisations. If they were to extract £100 from each organisation they compromised, the rewards to the hackers is £100,000,000 so you can see why they are so active in trying to compromise security and exploit organisations.

Most organisations have some security measures in place, but more often than not, organisations optimistically rely on staff to be vigilant, but attacks are becoming more sophisticated, using artificial intelligence (AI) to profile and target an organisation, exploiting the human weakness of familiarity, so if, at a glance, the email appears to come from someone within the organisation, it is more likely to succeed as the user is familiar with dealing with that person so is more likely to respond to requests to do things.

Hackers know that the weakest point of security in an organisation is the people, most people are helpful, wishing to collaborate with their colleagues, and it is this helpfulness that the hackers exploit. They prey on this vulnerability. People want to help each others in organisations and if they think they are helping a colleague, they are less likely to validate and verify where the email came from.

If they think it is from a colleague they are less likely to suspect the content, right? Combine this knowledge with the power of AI and hackers have a a very high success rate, often exploiting workers to pay invoices or make bank transfers to the hacker resulting in a fraudulent transaction and the business being out of pocket, often going un-noticed for a long period until the accounts are done and a discrepancy identified.

AI can harvest information from an organisation's websites, social media such as Linked-In, FaceBook, Instagram etc. so they can build a profile of individuals within the organisation and build an attack against that organisation.

This is why it is more important that ever to have sophisticated security in place to protect your business from Phishing threats that are ever evolving.

Security in IT should be layered to ensure multiple checks so that if one layer fails to prevent a threat, there is another layer to intercept.

Whilst Microsoft 365 has built in protections in email, it is not enough, which is why it is sensible to use additional tools to intercept threats in email.

Threat detection powered by AI, picks up real time threats, feeds the threat analysis back to a centralised network operations centre (NOC), where it is collated and then distributed out to all organisations using the same threat detection tool, providing an ever updated detection landscape that can keep abreast of real time ever changing threats.

This type of approach significantly reduces risk, but unfortunately doesn't eliminate it, which is why there is also the option to run Phishing simulations within Microsoft 365 if you have the correct license in the organisation.

This allows an organisation to see how alert staff members are and to see if staff do the right thing or fall for the Phishing email. If they do, they are redirected to a training site to learn how to identify phishing emails. This means that staff who do spot Phishing attempts do not have to do the training whilst those that do fail have the opportunity to learn.

The Phishing simulations can be scheduled and a variety of email templates can be used to test staff, this way they are constantly tested to ensure they know how to spot threats.

If you would like more information about protecting your organisation from email threats, call us on 01722 411 999 for a demonstration of email security and phishing simulations and training.

Is Your Organisation's Wireless Becoming A Bottleneck?

Wed, 23 Jul 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Are things running a little bit slower than you expect when you are on your organisation's wireless network? As connections to the internet have sped up, so has wireless technology, but a lot of organisations are still using older wireless networks, they work, so why upgrade them?

Why is this?

The primary reason is speed, if you have a bottleneck in your organisation it impacts productivity, maybe for a few, maybe for many, the thing is though, a lot of old wireless networks now work slower than using the internet on a mobile phone.

Traditionally the connection to the internet has been the bottleneck in a network, with internet connections being contended and slow, and have always been the slowest part of any network, however with the roll out of fibre internet connections across the UK, this is often no longer the case.

Fibre internet connections are providing much faster connections both to homes and businesses alike, with people often having gigabit internet connectivity, which then goes on to highlight bottlenecks elsewhere in the network, most commonly older wireless networks.

There is an old saying, "if it ain't broke, don't fix it", however even if something is working, it may now be of diminishing value and it may be time to invest in newer technology to get the benefit of faster network speeds.

More and more businesses are moving their data to being online, stored in online cloud storage, so accessing data is really vulnerable to latency, the longer it takes the more obvious it is.

Cloud based services are more prevalent as are things like online meetings using Microsoft Teams or Zoom or other providers. These require significant bandwidth and sometimes it is pretty obvious which clients suffer from slower connectivity with blocky images and jitter on the calls.

Ironically we have had instances where an organisation had staff who found it far more productive to work from home where their network was newer and faster than in the organisation, that was using an older wireless network. Whilst the organisation had a fast fibre internet connection, it still relied on an old, slow wireless which was the pinch point, meaning that staff connecting to the wireless networks had a far slower work experience than they were expecting.

What can you do about it?

Upgrading the wireless to new equipment that supports multiple antennas and wireless protocols 6 & 7 and tri-band wireless networks experiencing speeds of up to 11Gbps, taking the wireless network from being the slowest part of an organisations network, to being part of the fastest parts of the network.

Staff will experience a far better connection, with modern wireless being able to process faster connections and a much greater bandwidth of data transfer, allowing staff to concurrently work and all having the same, improved experience.

Why do it?

Predominantly it is as simple as the business bottom line, by improving staff productivity. Why curb your staff's productivity with older infrastructure that takes a lot longer to load their data when they could benefit from faster connectivity, allowing them to open documents faster and be more productive.

As an example let's say over time, each person using wireless saves 10 minutes per day of additional time they can be productive because they are no longer waiting or wasting time for things to load. That adds up to 50 minutes per week, almost an hour of reclaimed time where staff are more productive.

Then lets expand on this, staff typically work for approx 45 weeks per year (if you factor in holiday, bank holidays, sick days etc) so you would soon realise 2,250 of additional minutes of productivity for one person in a year, or roughly an extra 4 - 5 days of productivity, just from one member of staff.

How much do you pay your staff, wouldn't it be good to get an extra week of work per year from them?

If your organisation has 50 members of staff, that could equate to getting approx 234 additional days of productivity back from your staff, which is the equivalent of having one more person working for the business.

How much would it cost to employ 1 new member of staff, then compare that to the cost of upgrading the wireless network for at most, a few thousand pounds. I know which I would do because it is more cost effective.

In our example, we have used 10 minutes per day of increased productivity just to make the maths simple, however it is often a significantly higher number that businesses experience, with a huge uplift in performance and productivity, with staff being able to open and save large documents significantly quicker than they could before.

It is basic business sense to invest in providing your staff with a better performing network to boost their productivity, why pay for more staff when you can help get more from your existing headcount? Why hinder your staff, why hold them back with old kit, a small investment will return significant productivity boost within your organisation, a small investment to dramatically increase productivity.

Call us on 01722 411 999 to find out more about the latest wireless networks to help improve the user's work experience and boost your organisations productivity.