Central Illinois' IT Experts

Employees Can Cause A Lot of Issues

There are three ways that employees can be a threat to your business. Let’s go through them today. 

#1 - User Error

People make mistakes and sometimes when a mistake is made it has really negative consequences. Most of the time if it is a matter of a simple honest mistake, and not downright negligence, the negative consequences can be forgiven, but don't be surprised if there is some fury when your business deals with downtime, malware, and other issues that simple user errors can deliver. 

#2 - User Manipulation

Hackers aren’t dumb. They aren’t going to try and crack unhackable encryption. Instead of trying to do the impossible, attempting to breach a system that the best hackers in the world wouldn’t have time in their lives to break, they use their wits. Phishing and spear phishing, along with other social engineering tactics have worked for these people for years and if your employee falls for their “charms”, you will probably end up with some computer problems. 

#3 - Sabotage

The worst of the three, but also the least likely to strike your business. Some employees don't mess with their employment, but some people see an opportunity to steal or corrupt data and they take it. That’s why it is important to close down access to your network after someone leaves your company.

Actively Protect Your Business 

We’ve mentioned a couple of ways to keep your business secure already, but to create the security-first strategy that you need to have nowadays, you need to find ways to block out threats. You will want to implement, and consistently update, an access control system with role-based permission to keep your data from being accessed by just anyone. 

You should consistently remind your staff just how important their role in the overall security of your company is. This alone can have a substantial impact on your ability to keep your systems secure and keep you avoiding downtime. You will also need to ensure that all the security software—firewalls, antivirus, and the like—is consistently updated to ensure that you have the latest threat definitions. You should always keep your data backed up both onsite and in the cloud so that you can restore data should anything happen to you.

Lastly, it wouldn’t hurt to monitor your employees and ensure that they are well-trained so that, if something were to come their way, they could identify it and eliminate the threat. 

If you would like to learn more about cybersecurity tools and best practices, reach out to our IT security experts today at 217-475-0226.

The proper way to do so will look different, depending on whether you’re using PowerPoint 365 or PowerPoint 2016.

Using PowerPoint 2016

If your business still relies on Microsoft Office 2016, this is the procedure that you will need to follow to embed a video into one of your presentations:

1. Navigating to YouTube, find the video you wish to include in your presentation and, from the Share menu that appears when you click the option, select Embed.
2. You’ll then see a preview of your chosen video’s thumbnail, along with a series of code and some other options that allow you to control the point from which the video starts, whether your embedded video will provide viewers with controls, and the ability to enable a privacy-enhanced mode (which pertains more to videos that are posted on a website). Make sure you copy the code in its entirety.
3. Back in PowerPoint, click into the Insert tab and select Video. In the provided drop-down, choose Online Video.
4. In the box that appears, paste the code into the From a Video Embed Code field. Alternatively, you could attempt searching for the video you wanted to use using the YouTube search field.

Using PowerPoint 365

If you utilize PowerPoint 365, the process is somewhat similar, if not precisely:

1. On YouTube, locate the video you wish to embed into your presentation and copy its URL from the address bar.
2. Back in PowerPoint, click into the Insert tab and, from there, select Video and Online video….
3. Then it’s just a matter of pasting the URL into the Online Video dialog box.
4. From there, you also have the option of adding in various effects to the video preview (not the video that plays) via the buttons in the Video Format tab.

Microsoft PowerPoint (and other solutions like it) are excellent tools if you know how to use them and can acquire them. Decatur Computers Inc. can help with the second part for sure. To find out how we can assist your business with its critical technology, give our team a call at 217-475-0226.

Not so fast.

Obviously, a lot of business owners didn’t trust in work-from-home policies leading up to the COVID-19 outbreak, and many tried to last as long as they could with business-as-usual until state lawmakers started placing stay-at-home mandates on their constituents. With vaccines being pushed out quickly, there is a good chance that many of these business owners that were forced into remote solutions view the past 10 months as an aberration. Some won’t, however. We thought we’d take a look at the impact a return to “normalcy” will have on businesses.

Health and the Modern Workplace

With millions of people contracting COVID-19 and hundreds of thousands of people dying from the disease, the pandemic is still a very serious situation. It actually remains to be seen if the vaccines that are being pushed out will have the intended effect before lawmakers and business owners can demand a return to normal procedure. Even after this monumental day, it is definitely going to change the way people view their health inside the office.

Each year, most businesses have to deal with “cold-and-flu season”. That always gets kind of tricky with people missing work resulting in productivity plateauing. After a return to work many people just aren’t going to feel physically and psychologically safe being under the same roof as people, especially with the differences of opinion in vaccinations out there. What are people supposed to do when they work directly with people that refuse to be vaccinated? It’s a situation that most businesses have to deal with every year. Forrester Research found that 66 percent of American workers want to feel safe before being forced back into the workplace…

...but they do plan to come back.

About half of polled workers that currently work remotely as a result of the pandemic actively want to go back to their office and plan to do so when it is safe. The other half may take some convincing. One positive is that the less people working in an office, the more space that is available for “social distancing”, but it is going to be a real issue for some employers who don’t trust remote workers to work as productively and securely as they would at the office. They will either need to replace workers that aren’t willing to come back to the workplace—which will likely have an effect on their unemployment insurance outlay—or they will have to concede that productivity is high enough to continue supporting workers that don’t, for one reason or another, want to get back into their workplace. 

Technology Will Be More Important Than Ever

Many businesses had to take a sharp detour from their operational strategies when their workers started working from home, and as a result, it’s likely that the strategies that have been implemented in the interim won't be absolutely abandoned. There will probably be some additional flexibility for workers that have made it through these times and working remotely is just one of them. 

Meetings may continue to be through a video conferencing app like Skype, Google Meet, Zoom, or Discord. You could see the continued integration of technology designed to keep people from physically sharing the same space for a while after the pandemic ends. The collaboration tools are sure to stick around as many have become core pieces of businesses’ operational strategies. 

Businesses Will Innovate to Build Safe and Efficient Workplaces

Businesses aren’t just going to suddenly ignore the lessons learned during this period when the “all-clear” is given. They will be incorporated into business strategy to give themselves the best chance for success. You will begin to see strategies that are more innovative and press the issue a little more. You will begin to see smart technology deployed in places where there was thought to be too much risk. You will see software that promotes efficiency and collaboration to be the norm in most businesses. You will see businesses being more cognizant of employee health than ever before by implementing new programs that promote flexibility to ensure that their workers (and their worker’s families) are prioritizing health. One thing you are sure to see is more availability for people to work outside the office when they are sick or when they need to look after health-related situations. If there is one thing that people have learned during this period, it is that it’s hard to be productive when you are scared for your health. 

What do you think the new normal will look like when the pandemic finally ends? Do you think that things will go back to the way they were before or do you think that business owners and managers will promote new strategies that give workers more flexibility? Leave your thoughts in the comments section and return to our blog regularly for more great technology content.