Author: majestic

Office 365 is the brand name Microsoft uses for a group of subscriptions that provide productivity software and related services to businesses and consumers. The Office 365 service consists of a number of products and services which include Microsoft Office applications (Word, Excel, Powerpoint, Outlook, OneNote), collaboration tools (OneDrive, Sharepoint Online, Skype for Business, Yammer, Microsoft Teams) and cloud email hosting (Exchange).

The above products and services are used by all businesses – small and big – for their day to day work and productivity. As a business, if you are wondering if moving to Office 365 is really a solution for your business, the answer is yes. Although we can talk about “cooler features” that are available, as a business you probably say to yourself “I didn’t need any cool features up until now and my business is doing fine. Why do I need this now!”. That is why in this blog, we are going to talk about things you use right now in your business and how moving to Office 365 will help.

• Disaster Recovery Costs – As a business, you might be running some services like emails on an in-house server. If you are doing this, then you must have to worry about disasters like system crashes or natural disasters. To allow recovery from disasters, you must implement a disaster recovery plan, maintain it, change it as things change in the business and all of this just means “added cost”. By moving to a service like Office 365, you won’t have to worry about any of these costs as your data will always be available
• Predictable Costs – Office 365 allows you to pay for it’s services monthly and does not lock you into a contract. You can add, remove or reallocate licenses on demand. As a business owner, this means you can avoid large upfront costs for a new server or licenses
• Enterprise Email – A lot of businesses still use email services provided by their domain hosting company or internet service providers. The email service type is “POP3”. This email service type used to work in the old days when users were collecting emails only on one device (usually their office computer). With focus on mobility and remote workforce these days, users need to collect their emails on multiple devices (office computer, laptop, smart phones, tablets) and this is where a service like POP3 comes undone. POP3 service does not keep emails on all your devices in “sync” which means if an email is “read” on one device, it still shows up as “unread” on the second device. Another example is if you send an email from one device, it does not show up in the “sent items” of the second device. Office 365 hosted email service allows businesses of all sizes to make use of features that “enterprise” businesses have traditionally used. And again, with “no upfront costs”
• Licencing Nightmare – Traditionally businesses have bought software like Microsoft Office “as and when required”. This results in different users within a business using different versions of the software. This means situations like one user working on a file cannot collaborate with another user efficiently because “they use different versions of the software” are not uncommon. With Office 365, a business can ensure that all users are on the same version of the software and all updates are pushed to all users at the same time. As with any other product or service within Office 365, there is no upfront cost, only monthly costs
• Mix and Match Plans – Office 365 allows flexibility in terms of what products and services are made available to each user within a business. This means as a business, as an example, you do not have to buy “professional version” of Microsoft Office for everyone if only a few users need it. This can also be done with other software like Microsoft Project and Visio as well

The above are some of the “practical” examples that highlight how Office 365 can help a business of any size keep up with technology and improve their day to day working as well as productivity.

If you wish to know more if Office 365 is right for your business, please feel free to call us on 1300 441 551 for a free consultancy session.

These hardware vulnerabilities allow programs to steal data which is currently processed on the computer. While programs are not typically permitted to read data from other programs, a malicious program can exploit Meltdown and Spectre to get hold of secrets stored in the memory of other running programs.

This sensitive data might include your passwords stored in the password manager or browser, your personal photos, emails, instant messages and even business critical documents. Meltdown and Spectre work on personal computers, mobile devices, and in the cloud. Depending on the cloud provider’s infrastructure, it might be possible to steal data from other customers.

Meltdown breaks the most fundamental isolation between user applications and the operating system. This attack allows a program to access the memory, and thus also the secrets, of other programs and the operating system. This vulnerability basically melts security boundaries which are normally enforced by the hardware. Desktop, Laptop, and Cloud computers are effected by Meltdown. More technically, every Intel processor which implements out-of-order execution is potentially affected, which is effectively every processor since 1995 (except Intel Itanium and Intel Atom before 2013). If your computer has a vulnerable processor and runs an unpatched operating system, it is not safe to work with sensitive information. Luckily there are patches against the Meltdown for Linux, Windows and OS X operating systems.

Spectre breaks the isolation between different applications. It allows an attacker to trick error-free programs, which follow best practices into leaking their secrets.In fact, the safety checks of said best practices actually increase the attack surface and may make more applications susceptible to Spectre. Almost every system is affected by Spectre: Desktops, Laptops, cloud Servers, as well as Smartphones. More specifically, all modern processors capable of keeping many instructions in flight are potentially vulnerable. In particular, Spectre is verified on Intel, AMD, and ARM processors. Spectre tricks other applications into accessing arbitrary locations in their memory. Spectre attacks involve including a victim to speculatively perform operations that would not occur during correct program execution and which leak the victim’s confidential information via a side channel to the adversary.

For everyone – whether you are a system administrator for a very large enterprise, or you have a single home computer – Install this patch as soon as it is available from your vendor. For consumers, enabling auto update ensures that patches install as soon as they are available to your computer.

SD-WAN is an acronym for software-defined networking in a wide area network (WAN). Traditionally, multi-location offices have been interconnected using MPLS or VPN technology. These technologies, although more reliable, have been expensive to deploy and maintain.

With the availability of cheaper optic fibre based internet, NBN and 4G connections, SD-WAN is an inexpensive alternative to allow companies to build higher-performance WANs using lower-cost and commercially available internet access, enabling businesses to partially or wholly replace more expensive private WAN connection technologies such as MPLS. This is ideal for situations where non-real-time applications like emails and file sharing form bulk of the traffic between multiple offices within an organisation.

SD-WAN allows your company to make use of multiple lower-cost internet connections, often with different ISPs and a mix of technologies (optic fibre, NBN and 4G), to configure redundancy within the WAN. This in effect also means, that you are not tied into the same ISP for all your sites as would have been in the case of a MPLS alternative. SD-WAN allows flexibility of choosing the best ISP for each of your locations independently.

American marketing research firm Gartner predicted in 2015 that by the end of 2019 30% of enterprises will deploy SD-WAN technology in their branches.

SD-WAN products can be physical appliances or virtual appliances, and are placed in small remote and branch offices, larger offices, corporate data centres, and increasingly on cloud platforms. A centralised controller is used to set policies and prioritise traffic. The SD-WAN takes into account these policies and the availability of network bandwidth to route traffic. This helps ensure that application performance meets service level agreements (SLAs) and QoS.

Features of SD-WANs include resilience, security and quality of service (QoS), with flexible deployment options and simplified administration and troubleshooting.

• Resilience – A resilient SD-WAN reduces network downtime. The technology features real time detection of outages and automatic switch over to working links
• Quality of service – SD-WAN technology supports quality of service by having application level awareness, giving bandwidth priority to the most critical applications. This may include dynamic path selection, sending an application on a faster link, or even splitting an application between two paths to improve performance by delivering it faster
• Security – SD-WAN communication is usually secured using IPsec, a staple of WAN security
• Application optimisation – SD-WANs can improve application delivery using caching, storing recently accessed information in memory to speed future access
• Deployment options – Most SD-WAN products are available as pre-configured appliances, placed at the network edge in data centres, branch offices and other remote locations. There are also virtual appliances that can work on existing network hardware, or the appliance can be deployed as a virtual appliance on the cloud in environments such as Amazon Web Services (AWS). This allows enterprises to benefit from SD-WAN services as they migrate application delivery from corporate servers to cloud based services
• Administration and troubleshooting – Management simplicity is a key feature for SD-WANs. As with network equipment in general, GUIs are preferred to command line interface (CLI) methods of configuration and control. Other beneficial administrative features include automatic path selection, the ability to centrally configure each end appliance by pushing configuration changes out, and even a true software defined networking approach that allows all appliances and virtual appliances to be configured centrally based on application needs rather than the underlying hardware

Majestic Computer Technology has partnered with Cisco Meraki and uses their platform to deploy and manage SD-WANs. If you want to know more, please call us on 1300 441 551 for a free consultation session.

In the year 2016, Australian businesses have been hit with $589,000 in damages over the use of unlicensed software. “By using unlicensed software, businesses are compromising their cybersecurity policies and putting their customers data at risk. It can also result in financial losses for the business, as information can be intercepted and repurposed for others financial gain. Not to mention the impact to the reputation of the organisation, business and its employees during any legal proceedings.” BSA director of compliance programs, Gary Gan said.

During 2016, the global software industry advocate organisation which is widely known as BSA settled 14 cases Australia wide. Each business caught using unlicensed software was forced to purchase genuine software licenses for its ongoing use, in addition to paying the copyright infringement damages.

“Our 2016 results reflect the increased public awareness of the security and business challenges that unlicensed software poses to Australian businesses. We strongly encourage all businesses, across all sectors to implement an effective Software Asset Management (SAM) practice. This, combined with regular checks of software licenses and deployments, will ensure their business is secure and avoids legal risks,” Gan added.

Other than the risk of paying copyright infringement damages, other benefits of using licensed software are –

• Pirated software often contains malware which can lead to the theft of company’s confidential information.
• With licensed software, regular software updates are available to mitigate any risks associated with vulnerabilities discovered since the software was first released.
• Pirated software can cause severe damage to your computer hardware which requires hardware replacement.
• Having genuine and licensed software speaks volumes about your company’s reputation and governance.
• Avoid all unnecessary IT and cyber security risks.

Whatever IT compliance requirements your business has, Majestic can assist in ensuring that you are always on top of the requirements. Utilising the industry standard tools and best practices, technology experts at Majestic can help your organisation to review your compliance requirements, current setup and help you fill in the missing pieces. Any work related to IT audit and compliance completed by Majestic are documented using standard documentation processes.