Any Tech Solutions – protection is key for all of us

By Chris Palmer

I struggle to finds words that come close to conveying the current climate both from a business point of view and a personal one. Thankfully I am lucky enough to have people around me who make a real difference to my overall wellness. I can only feel for those who are alone and trying to run a business and their life – with no one to console them, share ideas and be creative with. And let’s not forget the children whose education has been severely disrupted and hampered.

While I admit to feeling uneasy regarding marketing during this period of uncertainty, I still have a compelling urge to help. After all, that’s why we started our business and what drives us to get out of bed every day. We want to help.

Due to the pandemic we have seen an incredible rise in cybercrime attempts. The routes to gain access to users’ personal information have increased in sophistication, intensity and success rate. From the usual online banking scams right through to posing as sellers of puppies and selling fake COVID-19 cures, we’ve seen it all; so right now protection is key for all of us.

From a business perspective the current situation is forcing business owners to be more creative but also to be sensitive in the way we go about marketing to our audience – not a bad thing. It’s given us time to re-evaluate, take stock and improve what we do and how we go about doing it. In our business we have approached our marketing efforts purely from a ‘what do our users need?’ and ‘how can we help them survive and thrive?’ point of view rather than the traditional ‘you have pain and we have the antidote’ tack.

Personally I have found the new calm a refreshing change from the crazy pace we were running at – I’m still incredibly busy but I’m now in a completely different headspace. In this time we have upgraded no fewer than three of our main back end support systems which in turn will allow us to provide support and monitoring at an entry level cost along with increasing our automation processes for the betterment of our client base.

Moving forwards and through the uncertainty, I feel we are on the verge of a new horizon: more of us working in many more locations, more collaboration, teaming up of businesses to handle overflow or bolt on special services. However, this has its own pitfalls. Many users are using their own personal hardware and software for work purposes and we have seen an increase in issues being caused by breaches via untrusted and unprotected devices connecting to business services, like corporate email accounts etc. So there is a downside, which all business owners with remote teams must now consider and they must start to understand the possible weaknesses in their expanding digital network.