The ACCENT Learning Hub

Have you ever wanted your work days to be a little easier, or to get things done just a little  faster? Technology makes us more productive in a lot of cases, but it can also slow us down if we aren’t familiar with the best ways to use it. Luckily, many time-saving features are built-in and easy to use.

Trying to keep up-to-date on how to stay safe from cyber criminals these days can be nearly impossible. Most have no idea how or where to even begin. There are plenty of security measures to consider, but a good place to start would be to run the suggested updates on your computers and mobile devices. I know it’s tempting to push the “Maybe Later” button when they pop up, but these updates are for your own safety. Sometimes they add software features, but many times, they’re fixing bugs and plugging security holes. Installing these updates when they come out can help avoid major security problems, such as the one Microsoft is doing its best to fix right now.

Rancho Cucamonga, CA (December 3, 2018) – “Everyone truly works as a team; Great place to learn and grow; No micro managing.” Those are just three of the comments that employees included on the anonymous survey that landed Accent Computer Solutions, Inc. on Inland News Group’s 2018 list of Top Workplaces for the fourth year in a row.

Accent Computer Solutions, Inc. has been named a top Managed Security Service Provider (MSSP) by Channel Futures, an IT industry organization. The criteria for this designation reflects the company’s aggressive investment in cyber security, as well as a commitment to meeting the needs for IT security and IT management on an ongoing basis.

If you are looking for a managed IT services price list, we might assume that you either know that you need to make a change in how you’re resourcing IT support or you’re wondering if you should be making a change. Either way, frustrations with IT are probably the catalyst for your research. If you’re like a lot of business owners and executives, you’ve lived with your IT problems for longer than you need to because you aren’t sure if there is anything better out there.

The best, and arguably the worst, thing about the rapid growth of technology is options. Long gone are the days where chocolate or vanilla were your only choices. In a post-Ben & Jerry’s world of Truffle Kerfuffle and Chubby Hubby, how are you supposed to know what to pick? And maybe the million-plus specialty ice cream flavors out there isn't exactly the same. But it’s easy to feel as overwhelmed by specialty ice cream as when you’re evaluating your server options.

Imagine that you get an invoice from a hospital for $125,000. No doubt you’ll experience sticker shock at the high cost of medical care. But wait a minute. This hospital is in a city that you have never visited, and it’s for a surgery that you never had. How did this happen? You’ve just become another victim of medical fraud. You can now expect to spend a few hundred hours of your life and thousands of dollars of your own money to clean up the mess that a cyber criminal made by stealing and using your medical records.

In a recent blog article, Marty Kaufman recounts the story of meeting with a business owner who was panicked and in crisis mode because of a cyber attack. If we could backtrack to the days, weeks and months before the attack, we would probably find that the business owner did not pay much attention to cyber security at all because he didn’t think that a data breach could happen to him. Well, it could, and it did. We can’t go back in time and undo all the damage that has been done by this cyber attack, but we can help other executives avoid stumbling over some common misconceptions that unknowingly increase cyber risk.

When cyber security is part of your business strategy, it acts like a fitness plan. You’ll never know what illnesses or injuries you avoided by being on the plan, but you notice that your ability to maneuver is much better than your peers. Still, it’s often difficult for executives to contemplate the ROI of cyber security. Maybe that’s because you can’t directly measure the output from the input. You can, however, when you make it a habit to consider security alongside your business goals.

It might be time to drop the word “cyber” when talking about cyber security because managing cyber risk is really about managing business risk. IT certainly plays an important role in how information technology systems and stored data are protected, but executives need to understand that there is more at risk than they realize. For example, executives sometimes make decisions in the name of productivity or cost savings that compromise security. Perhaps these decisions would be made differently if the executives realized what a risky situation their actions created and they asked themselves these five questions.