Clearmind Technology, Inc. Blog

When team members bypass IT security guidelines, it is rarely out of malice. In nearly every case, employees are simply trying to get their daily work done without running into digital roadblocks that slow them down. Understanding the reality of security friction is the absolute first step toward fixing it.

We’ve all been there. You’re flying through your inbox, trying to reach inbox zero before a meeting, and you click a link in a shipping notification. The page doesn't load quite right. You stare blankly and your anxiety spikes.

That moment happens a lot and it is a fork in the road for your company’s security. In many organizations, that employee’s next thought isn’t: “I should report this,” it is: “If I tell anyone, I’m going to get fired.”

How does your business handle the onboarding and offboarding of employees? Depending on your processes, it might involve completing tasks or wrestling with new technology. Whether you like it or not, managing the onboarding and offboarding of employees is a critical part of any business operation from both a security and operational standpoint. Let’s go over how you can make them better.

Running a small or medium-sized business is difficult enough without having to worry about cyber threats all the time. If you haven’t updated your security systems in a while, your infrastructure could be at risk. In fact, when considering IT security, we recommend adopting zero trust as a security measure, and we’ll explain why.

Imagine giving every single person you work with a key to your house. Would you do it? Probably not, right? What if someone lost their key or had it stolen? You wouldn’t want to take that risk.

So, it stands to reason that if you can’t trust the people you work with every day with a key to your house, you wouldn’t want them to have access to all of your data; or your business’.

Downtime can be lethal to businesses, not only because too much can lead to failure, but it can easily waste a lot of your team’s time as everyone shifts gears to find a solution. This is why is it best to avoid it as often as possible.

That’s why we’re discussing three of the most prevalent causes of downtime, and what you can do to prevent them.

Your business works with a lot of vendors. Each of these vendors requires your time, energy, and resources. Do you have the assets to handle all of them yourself, or would it all be better spent elsewhere on more profitable tasks and projects? Today, we’ll highlight your business’ vendor management options.

Today, IT is important for many things. It's not just a small part of a company… but how deeply is IT woven into modern workplace culture? Let's delve into how technology and culture coalesce in today's businesses.

Believe it or not, if you were to rank your business’ greatest threats, risk factors, and vulnerabilities, your users would most likely belong somewhere toward the top. Human error is a big challenge to your security simply because cybercriminals understand that your employees are, in fact, human and will, in fact, make mistakes.

Let’s explore how cyberattacks exploit this tendency and how you can better protect your business from the ramifications.

Among IT professionals, an acronym is sometimes used when discussing certain issues and challenges: “PEBKAC,” or Problem Exists Between Keyboard And Chair. In other words, user error. 

Mindset is important regardless of what someone is doing, but it plays an especially important part in the workplace. This only becomes more true when that workplace is distributed, and work is actually done in the worker’s home.

Let’s go into the kind of perspective you want to encourage in your team as they utilize remote work.

Remote work has changed the way that businesses approach normal operations. Due in large part to the disruptions of the past couple of years, remote work has become a staple of the business environment, and while you might hear stories of businesses pushing hard to return to the workplace, the reality is that they are the exception rather than the norm.

The workplace has undergone a dramatic shift over the past several years in favor of remote work, due in no small part to worldwide circumstances. In fact, many workers who would prefer to work in-office found themselves unable to, pushing the button on the topic of remote work even more. While there are some outspoken companies that want to see the return of in-office work, experts in the industry seem to be of the opposite opinion.

Digital monitoring is a bit of a contentious topic in business, but according to a survey from Gartner, it might not be as contentious of a topic as previously thought. In fact, employees are often in favor of digital monitoring under the appropriate circumstances, as long as it doesn’t get in the way of their jobs.

Password changes, multi-factor authentication, and countless changes in policy and procedure can make daily workflows more and more complicated. Cybersecurity can truly be a pain—a necessary pain, granted—but a pain nevertheless, and one that can gradually lead to burnout if you aren’t careful. Let’s go over how to mitigate the likelihood of it.

Technology is only effective in the hands of the right—or, at least, well-trained—employees. To work toward this goal, you’ll have to ramp up your hiring processes to ensure you garner the interest of the right candidates for the jobs. Nowhere is this more true than for your IT department. Let’s go over how you can make your business an attractive employment option for skilled and innovative technicians.

Whether or not you believe acronyms are an acceptable form of speech, some people might use them habitually or instinctively even for business communications. Of course, they don’t have much place in this context, but habits are hard to break. To address this issue, one innovative thinker has created a tool that can help determine if the acronym “LOL” is sincere or not.

With technology playing such a massive role in modern business processes, having someone in the higher ranks to oversee it is a huge advantage. This is the role of the Chief Information Officer—the CIO—which makes them an integral part of the modern C-suite.

So, what kind of thing does the CIO (or your business’ equivalent of it) need to know and consider in order to fulfill their role? 

Hot desking—the workplace organization method wherein there are no assigned workstations—has an assortment of pros and cons to it, but many companies are finding the more fiscal benefits to be worth the trade-offs. Let’s explore some of the pros and cons of hot desking, and go over a few tips and strategies that will help if you choose to implement it. 

It doesn’t matter if your workplace is your typical office space or if it is remote. There will always be factors that can contribute to burnout. These struggles are not exclusive to the location of the office, and if left unchecked they can impact work performance, productivity, mental health, and so on. It’s important that you have coping mechanisms and strategies in place to address burnout before it becomes too severe to counter.