We’re Inspiring Britain!

By:

We’ve been trading for over 23 years and it’s safe to say, we’re an SME who knows what they’re talking about.

Over the past couple of years, we’ve been focusing a lot of our attention on building our brand and gaining recognition for our innovative products and services. The amount of positive feedback we have received for our efforts is unreal and we’ve been revelling in our success!

Not only were we recognised last year by Channel Web as one of three ‘genuinely brilliant VAR websites’. We’ve also recently been featured in LSE’s ‘1000 companies to Inspire Britain’ report.

The report identifies the companies who inspire Britain, it also celebrates the UK’s fastest-growing and most dynamic SMEs and we’ve been included.

Being named as an inspiring company is not only a big win for PCS, especially as we didn’t solicit it, but we’re equally pleased to be placed alongside so many respected companies. As a business with growth and innovation at the heart of what we do, we’re delighted to be part of this’.

Stuart Knott – Managing Director

To be included in the list, companies must outperform their peers and show consistent growth, so we’re honestly honoured that we cut the mustard!

It’s great to see that our efforts aren’t going unheard. Our hard work is paying off and it’s down to a combination of our staff, our services and our customers.

So, thank you!

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Registered in England No. 3082062

2-4 Northfield Point
Cunliffe Drive
Kettering
Northamptonshie
NN16 9QJ

08452 41 41 55

The post We’re Inspiring Britain! appeared first on PCS.

source https://www.pcs-systems.com/inspiring-britain/

Part Two: Cyber Essentials

By: Sam Geary, Marketing Executive

If you’ve been staying up-to-date with our blog, you probably know that we’ve been focusing our efforts on data protection recently all in aid of the GDPR (yes, the new regulation that started today). 

This is part two of our five-part blog focusing on the security of your business and your data. In our previous blog we focused our attention on ‘Patch Management’… If you didn’t catch it then have a read here.

Today I’ll be telling you all about Cyber Essentials and explaining why getting certified can save your business from 80% of cyber-attacks.

Let’s start with the basics and explain what Cyber Essentials actually is…

If you don’t already know, Cyber Essentials is a government backed, industry supported scheme to help organisations protect themselves against common online threats.

Cyber Essentials prevents most cyber-attacks. This can be things like malware infections, social engineering attacks (such as phishing) and hacking.

Why do you need Cyber Essentials?

There are various reasons why Cyber Essentials will benefit your business. The scheme is there to help companies of all sizes demonstrate to customers and stakeholders that the most fundamental elements of cyber security has been implemented.

Cyber Essentials is suitable for organisations of all sizes. It demonstrates security, increases opportunity and saves your business money.  There are five key areas that Cyber Essentials helps to protect, these are known as the five key controls of Cyber Essentials:

The 5 Key Controls of Cyber Essentials

 

• Boundary Firewalls and Internet Gateways
• Secure Configuration
• Malware Protection
• Boundary Firewalls and Internet Gateways
• Patch Management

To learn more about the 5 key controls and how the government backed scheme can create a cost-effective cyber security solution for your business visit our Cyber Essentials information webpage, it focuses on the scheme and highlights how we can help assist your business.

There are two levels of certification: Cyber Essentials and Cyber Essentials Plus. We can provide support and assistance for both levels of certification.

Some businesses believe that they are not in danger of Cyber Attacks because they have ‘anti-virus’ software or protection software of some kind that helps guard their infrastructure from what they believe to be cyber-attack. Well the truth of the matter is – every business in vulnerable to cyber breaches. Even the most secure business can find itself being hit by a breach. This proves that it’s not just about the size or scale of a business.

Unpatched systems are an easy target for criminals looking to gain access to corporate networks. Patch management also ensures that potential problems can be resolved as soon as possible before your business grinds to an untimely halt. It also frees up a huge amount of time allowing you to focus on other areas of your business.

Cyber Essentials is recommended for all businesses. So, if you’re a big, small or medium sized business we’d recommend that you either get in touch with us or do some research on the scheme if you’re considering investing in it.

If you’ve read this and would like to find out more about Cyber Essentials or Patch Management, then get in touch today and speak to a member of the team who can advise you on Cyber Essentials Certification.

If you haven’t gathered all the information you had hoped for from this blog, then please visit our individual resources on Cyber Essentials:

Cyber Essentials: How we can help

Cyber Essentials: Protecting Your Business

Cyber Essentials: The Five Key Controls

So, that’s all for this blog post, I hope it has been somewhat informative. Remember, if you want to find out any more information about Cyber Essentials – we have our very own expert who specialises in all things cyber security here at PCS. Get in touch today.

Part 3 will be focusing around backup and disaster recovery. Ask yourself, could your business afford to be down for 24 hours? If the answer is no, then join us for the third of our five-part blog where we’ll be talking about backup and disaster recovery.

Until next time!

Meet The Author

Name:	Sam Geary
Employment Start Date:	August 2017
Job Title:	Marketing Executive
Years in Marketing:	3

Check out Sam on Social Media:

PCS

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Registered in England No. 3082062

2-4 Northfield Point
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Kettering
Northamptonshie
NN16 9QJ

08452 41 41 55

The post Part Two: Cyber Essentials appeared first on PCS.

source https://www.pcs-systems.com/part-two-cyber-essentials/

Part One: Patch Management

By: Sam Geary, Marketing Executive

Recently we’ve been focusing our efforts around five of our fully managed products and services:

 

• Patch Management
• Cyber Essentials
• Backup and Disaster Recovery
• Antivirus
• Encryption

The points above are fundamental for the security of your business and all help aid your GDPR journey.

*Technical quote alert*

Article 32 of the new regulation highlights the importance of implementing technical and organisational measures to ensure a level of security appropriate to risk.

It also highlights the importance of encrypting and backing up personal data in the result of a physical or technical accident.

To read Article 32 click here.

 

I’m not going to go into the specifics of GDPR as you’re all probably bored to death of the term. But unfortunately, there’s no escaping the new regulation as the deadline approaches.

Anyway… back to points mentioned above. These are five very important things you should invest in to keep your business safe. That’s not to say that if you don’t have them your business will crumble, but there will always be a ‘what if’ and why risk the safety and data of your business when you can protect it?

So ask yourself…

What if your IT infrastructure was infected with ransomware?

What if your offices were flooded and your entire infrastructure was ruined?

What if a key member of your team left their laptop on the train?

All the above scenarios would cause your business an immense amount of disruption. So, it’s all about putting measures in place to reduce the amount of downtime your business experiences if the above scenarios were to happen.

This leads me on to part 1 of this four-part blog!

Starting with ‘Patch Management’.

Let’s go back to basics. What is ‘patch management’?

Put simply a patch is a piece of code that can be applied to a software programme after it’s been installed.  Patches are created to correct issues that are discovered after it has been released.

Analogy alert!

Think of it like maintaining a car.
You can still drive a car without having it regularly serviced and without changing any parts…
But… It’ll become dangerous to drive if you keep avoiding to take it to the garage and eventually the car may break down or cause an accident.

It’s the same with your IT infrastructure, if you don’t regularly patch your systems they become susceptible to threats and this can eventually cause downtime to your business.

The task of patching involves acquiring, testing and installing multiple patches to an administered computer system. As soon as software or an operating system gets released, hackers look for faults and vulnerabilities that give them access and let them in.

Unpatched systems are an easy target for criminals looking to gain access to corporate networks. Patch management also ensures that potential problems can be resolved as soon as possible before your business grinds to an untimely halt. It also frees up a huge amount of time allowing you to focus on other areas of your business.

Nowadays, almost all businesses use work devices outside the office. While manually updating on-site systems may be time consuming, it is at least possible- but what would you do if your business has employees who work remotely? Patch management ensures that all your corporate devices stay updated- wherever they are.

I’m not going to give you a thousand reasons why patch management is a good investment for your business but if you’re serious about your data and cyber security we would highly recommend that you put some time aside to learn about the benefits.

PCS Patch Management:
– Support for all Microsoft updates
– Systems vulnerability checks
– Up-to-date IT assets
– Telephone/remote support
– Reduced risk of cyber attacks
– Scheduled patches

If you’ve read this and want to find out more, get in touch with us today. We offer a fully managed Patch Management service that takes away the hassle of updating your own patches.

To find out more about Patch Management get in contact with us today.

We’ve still got four more services to cover so bookmark our blog and stay tuned for part two of our quintet of blog posts on business security where we’ll be covering Cyber Essentials.

Thanks for reading and catch you next time!

PCS

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Registered in England No. 3082062

2-4 Northfield Point
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Kettering
Northamptonshie
NN16 9QJ

08452 41 41 55

The post Part One: Patch Management appeared first on PCS.

source https://www.pcs-systems.com/part-one-patch-management/

Choosing The Right Encryption Solution

PCS Managed Encryption

By: Scott Hawkey, Technical Manager

Quite some time ago PCS Business Systems decided to add a “managed” encryption product to the existing managed services portfolio.

Unfortunately for me being the Technical Manager, it meant that finding, testing and implementing this solution was going to fall on my door step.

So, I thought I’d put a little blog post together detailing my experience of on premise and cloud based products and the pros and cons of both.

At PCS we look after about 450 odd managed service customers. These range from one-man band type companies with a single server and workstation, right through to large enterprise level organisations with hundreds of servers and thousands of workstations and pretty much everything in between.

So, when it came to finding a solution to fit our offerings I knew it was going to be a tricky one.

Most of the encryption products on the market (and there’s a lot) require the encryption management console to be installed on premise on one of the customers servers…

Imagine that – having to remote into hundreds of servers every day to manage the encryption. Not only would it be soul destroying it would be almost impossible to manage. That being said, we wanted to test the products to see how they performed and what benefits they could offer to our customers.

So, a test environment was setup in our demo lab at PCS and we set about testing various products.

Just to be clear I’m not going to shoot any vendors down as I don’t think that’s fair, many of their products are very good and designed to be used in a non-managed service way so I won’t name and shame at any point.

Once the lab was setup, we started to roll out our first test product which offered full disk encryption to our various test laptops. At this point it became apparent that this was going to be a nightmare.

In short, the first test didn’t go well for the following reasons:

• Complicated management console installation
• Client software deployment disruptive to the end user
• Windows features updates meant the disk had to be unencrypted and re encrypted 4 times a year?

To be fair, once I’d got to this point I was out with this product… I’ve only listed 3 things I don’t like about it but I can assure you that there were going to be many more, either way this wasn’t the product for us.

 

So on to the next one.

The next one was a cloud-based encryption product which managed the native device encryption on Windows and Mac devices.

My first impressions were good, it was very easy to setup and the deployment was straight forward. I completed a sync with the test Active Directory I had created to pull the test user accounts into the cloud portal, created the deployment packages relevant to the operating system and we were ready to deploy.

Ah… This is where the stumbling blocks came in. The product was fine if you just wanted to ensure the native encryption (BitLocker and FileVault) were enabled, that’s pretty much all it did.

That being said not all Windows operating systems include BitLocker. For example, Windows 7 Professional doesn’t, which meant that we were unable to offer this solution to our customer base, because believe it or not lots of customers still run Windows 7.

Not only that, the product didn’t offer any back-end functionality, you couldn’t wipe the data from the device if it was lost or stolen, all it pretty much did was report on the encryption status and manage the BitLocker /FileVault keys, so again this wasn’t the one for us.

Although the two product tests we completed had not given us a solution, they had given us a whole list of things that we would require if we were going to offer this solution as “managed” to our customers.

The research began again, we did trial another two products, but we came up with almost identical issues as above which by now was becoming a little boring.

We were almost at the point where we felt that there just wasn’t a product out there that would enable us to add this service to our portfolio.

Then out of the blue there it was… After months of research into this we found ourselves a product that did pretty much everything we needed and could be fully tailored to our offering and how we work as an MSP.

The product ticked a lot of the boxes for us.

• Cloud based centralized management console
• Simple to deploy and manage
• Enabled use of sub accounts for our customers
• Provided encryption for pretty much all Windows/Mac operating systems
• Offered back end remote management tools
• Mobile device management
• External storage management

So, we set about running a trial in our lab, as mentioned above there is nothing to install onsite it’s all cloud based which makes for a very simple setup. Device agents are created automatically and can be deployed via group policy or similar and the navigation through the menus were clear and easy to use.

The product itself and the way it manages encryption was very similar to a previous product we had tested but this one offered lots more functionality.

We were able to manage the native encryption on Windows and Mac devices and also provide encryption to Windows devices that didn’t natively have BitLocker enabled. The back-end functionality was awesome, it provided us the ability to be able to:

• Deactivate devices
• Mark as lost or stolen which removed encryption keys effectively making the data on the device useless
• Check encryption status of the device
• Apply back end policies
• Full device reporting

This coupled with the fact that we were also able to provide full encryption and remote management to removable storage and mobile devices (phones, tablets etc) meant that we had found our product.

After many months of testing in the lab and eventually rolling the product out to the live PCS network we were ready to take the product to market.

With GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation) on the horizon we couldn’t have timed it better, if you’re not aware of the new regulation that comes into effect on the 24th of May then you must have been on another planet for the last 18 months.

In short, GDPR is being brought in to protect personal identifiable information, I won’t go into the full details around it, you can read all about it on the ICO website if you want to find out more.

The protection of data is key under the GDPR and having devices which contain personal identifiable information on is mentioned a few times as an example.

Encryption is mentioned in article 32 of GDPR “Security of Processing”

The initial response to our Managed encryption product has been great, we have rolled it out to laptops, desktops, mobile phones and tablet devices on mass and have had some really good feedback from our customers on it.

If you want to find out a little bit more about our encryption product please take a look here, alternatively get in touch and I’ll be happy to run through it with you.

Employment Start Date:	September 2007
Job Title:	Technical Manager
Years in IT	20
Twitter	@PCS_Scotth

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Registered in England No. 3082062

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Northants
NN16 9QJ

08452 41 41 55

The post Choosing The Right Encryption Solution appeared first on PCS.

source https://www.pcs-systems.com/pcs-managed-encryption/

Recap Of The Day – GDPR: The Nuts & Bolts

We came, we saw, we conquered.

By: Sam Geary, Marketing Executive

There’s just over three weeks until the May 25th GDPR deadline but if you haven’t prepared yet we can still help!

So one week on from our event, we look back and recap the key areas from the day. If you’re reading this and you attended, thank you very much, the day was a complete success! If you’re reading this and you didn’t attend, you missed out. Big time.

It’s not too late to begin your GDPR journey and learn how we can help make your journey as smooth as possible from an IT point of view.

So let me take you back to the day of our event…

Although the event registrations didn’t start until 9am. The event team at PCS started their day at around 7:30am (ish) at the Marriott Hotel in Northampton.

We came prepped with everything we needed for the day… From printed material (including our snazzy new brochure), pop up stands, roller banners, technical gear, promo kit… You name It, we had it.

We were well equipped for the day and ready to smash it. From arranging all the promo gear to setting the PowerPoint presentation up… Every last moment was spent making sure that everything was ready.

9-10am: The registrations kicked off. Slow to start, but they quite rapidly picked up. We were all very busy bees.

We had around 90 people register for the event online and expected a 50% dropout. So, we expected around 45 people to arrive and we would have been fairly happy with this.

But, fairly happy we were not.

We were bloody elated.

We had a grand total of 69 people attend our event and they were all eager and ready to get stuck in.

Attendees were given the bits they needed at the start of the day, including the agenda and notes sheet. It was nearing 10am and after the last few people came through the doors we were ready to begin.

10- 11am: Everyone was seated, and Chris kick started the event. He did the welcome speech and covered everything from introductions, refreshments, toilets, fire exits etc. He then passed the mic to Hannah Steggles from Howes Percival Solicitors who was the first keynote speaker of the event. Hannah covered the fundamentals of GDPR from a legal point of view and really seemed to grab the attention of the attendees.

It was great seeing people jot down notes in the swanky notepads/notes sheet we provided them with at the start- it was nice to see everything play a part in making the event a success.

So far, so good!

11:15am (ish): After Hannah’s talk, there was a short break where attendees were given the chance to grab a drink and mingle. This was a great opportunity for the guys at PCS to catch up with customers/prospects and have a general chat with the people who took the time out of their day to attend our event.

11:45am: After the break it was back to business, kicking off with our very own Scott– the second keynote speaker. Scotts talk went down well with the audience. It gave him a chance to focus on the IT side of GDPR and explain how PCS could help assist.

12:30 (ish): Lunchtime! We had vegetarian options and nothing contained nuts, so food wise, we were covered. In great British style, an orderly queue was formed, and after everyone collected their food, they settled down to eat with colleagues, Account Managers and other likeminded business people.

1:20 – 3:30pm (ish): After lunch the breakout sessions were ready to being. At this point, many attendees decided to change the sessions they initially signed up for. This luckily wasn’t an issue because there was enough room in each of the breakout rooms for extra people.

Before the event, attendees were asked to choose their breakout sessions online, but many decided to switch them on the day for various reasons, including the fact that the keynote speakers were very informative… So alot of people got the information they needed from these sessions. Luckily the rooms were big enough and chairs were available for the handful of people who changed their mind.

It’s things like this you don’t really think about pre-event and although some things are unavoidable it’s definitely something to consider when we have future events. People are entitled to change their minds so forward thinking is very important.

The day before the event we put together some giveaway bags for attendees, we planned to give these out at the end of the event as a ‘thank you’ for attending.

We asked registries for their top size a couple of weeks before the event because we were getting some swaggy branded gym tops made for the giveaway bags. Luckily not many questioned why we were asking for their size, so the element of surprise was still there!

After we received the branded gym tops, we packed and labelled the giveaway bags with the names of the people who had provided us with their size.

Between the breakout sessions we laid these bags out on tables in alphabetical order (by ‘we’ I mainly mean we passed the bags to Claire and she laid them out and made them look pretty). Although the bags were sorted beforehand, we still needed to cater for the people who registered for the event later or didn’t provide us with their top size.

Luckily this is where forward thinking comes into play…

Luckily this is where forward thinking comes into play again. So, we had a selection of bags and spare gym tops for those who didn’t have a
pre-made giveaway.

Between breakout sessions, people started to collect their freebies and before we knew it, the sessions had finished and most of the bags had been collected. In exchange for the bags we asked attendees to make a swap for their feedback forms (there is no such thing as a freebie after all).

I’d say we received about 80% of the feedback forms back. So, if you’re reading this and you attended our event but didn’t leave us your feedback, please let us know your thoughts. It comes in very handy for future event and we also strive towards perfection so we’d appreciate any feedback, whether it’s good, bad or ugly!

The amount of positive feedback we’ve received from the attendees has been immense (we even received some great feedback from our speakers at the event) we couldn’t be happier with how smoothly everything went. From the planning to the execution, the day ran smoother than we could have imagined so as you can imagine, we were all thrilled after it finished.

It may seem like a simple task- organising an event, but you don’t appreciate the detail until you are there, on the day, experiencing it all. It’s only then that you can really understand the complexity of an event and how forward planning is so important.

It’s been brilliant being part of something so successful. So all I can say is… bring on the next one!

Employment Start Date:	August 2017
Job Title:	Marketing Executive
Years in Marketing	3
Twitter	@PCS_Samantha

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Registered in England No. 3082062

2-4 Northfield Point
Cunliffe Drive
Kettering
Northants
NN16 9QJ

08452 41 41 55

The post Recap Of The Day – GDPR: The Nuts & Bolts appeared first on PCS.

source https://www.pcs-systems.com/event-recap/