Why You Should Encrypt Email

Why You Should Encrypt Email

Encryption can be an invaluable tool for your company, especially where your email communications are concerned. Here, we’ll go over a few of the benefits you can see by adopting it – but first, we’ll briefly go over what encryption is.

What is Encryption?

Looking at the word itself and breaking it down into its parts, the root of the word encryption is “crypt,” from the Greek kruptos, meaning “hidden.”When something is encrypted, it just means that it is hidden from view unless one has the key to decrypt it. While the process of encryption actually scrambles the data, this is an apt way of describing the end result: when an email is encrypted, only the intended recipient will be able to read it properly.

This leads to some of the greatest benefits that this process has to offer, especially where your business’ emails are concerned.

Security

Naturally, security is the primary motivation for encrypting data, as it is a pretty effective measure to take. With so much sensitive and private data being passed along through email in businesses of all sizes, protecting it through encryption measures is a must for any organization.

Nowadays, rather than attack your network to gain access to your communications, hackers prefer to seek a peek at them while they’re in transit, outside of your business’ protections. Encryption renders them unable to do so with any efficacy. After all, a hacker would find the phrase: “Password: fn*o807jsL” very valuable… not so much when all they can see is “bh16//57xf+lkbv/sdn.”

This also ties into another reason why a business should be encrypting their emails.

Compliance

Depending on the industry it falls under; one business may have more stringent regulations than another regarding data privacy. The example you’ll likely hear is the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, or HIPAA.

Under the rules set by HIPAA, health information cannot – cannot – be shared without the patient’s consent. The thing is, if a hacker were to intercept an email that contained this information as it was being exchanged between two approved parties, this would count as a HIPAA violation. Email encryption adds that additional layer of protection to the correspondence, protecting both (in this case) patient and provider.

Efficiency

If the correct technology is leveraged, there is no longer the need to jump through hoops in order to ensure the security of your emails. That means that, rather than taking the time to manually secure your emails, your solution protects them on your behalf.

Interested in learning more about encryption and how it can benefit you? Reach out to WheelHouse IT at (877) 771-2384!

Boost Project Collaboration with New Business Communication Apps

Boost Project Collaboration with New Business Communication Apps

For the business owner that likes to keep his/her pulse on how his/her staff communicates, email has traditionally been the best solution.

Most enterprise email setups these days will provide you with email, file storage, and an integration for a messaging application–all of which have their uses–but, today’s business owner has to understand that their employees are living more mobile lives and can be productive when they’re on the move.

Typically, the email application, no matter how strong their integrations are, doesn’t support real-time text messaging, but today there have been a couple solutions developed to speed up and streamline business communications, they are Slack and Microsoft Teams.

What is Slack?

Slack, an acronym for “Searchable Log of All Conversations and Knowledge” takes the best parts of your enterprise email solution and the best parts of your instant messaging program and combines them into one interface. It basically allows an organization to make communication more efficient. Slack is hosted in the cloud, so it is available on nearly any mobile device that’s connected to the Internet and comes with drag-and-drop file sharing capabilities and dozens of integrations that would allow you to share work files right in the interface.

Bottom line, Slack is a business collaboration tool. It allows any user to set up chat feeds (that function much like forums) that are relevant to their responsibilities in an organization and set custom notification settings for every chat they are in. This gives each worker a custom interface that allows them to communicate the way they need to, to be their most productive. Where it really shines, however, is in project management. Each project can have its own feed, with smaller departments that may be working on individual parts of the project having their own Slack chat. This streamlines business and gives any team the kick it its pants that a dedicated email-IM-file storage interface does not.

The one element of Slack that makes it the most effective is the dozens of productivity applications that Slack integrates with. With integrations with Google Hangouts, Google Drive, Twitter, Asana, WordPress, Mailchimp, and more, Slack works to make your business faster than ever with innovative solutions that cover almost any aspect of your business. Slack can be used for free, but for an enterprise edition it has a small monthly cost per user. With over 8 million active paid users, it is one of the fastest growing tech applications around.

What is Microsoft Teams?

Much like Slack, Microsoft Teams is a chat and collaboration platform designed to streamline business communications and project fulfillment. Unlike Slack, however, Microsoft already has a major foothold in the business productivity space with their world-beating Microsoft Office 365 offering. Teams is essentially tying all their useful productivity apps like Word, Excel, PowerPoint, OneNote, SharePoint, Power BI, together with an all-in-one messaging hub.

With so many people already using the cloud-hosted Microsoft Office 365 suite, having a place to streamline communications and share files within that platform is a complete game changer for businesses. Access to files, internal sites, and dashboards are controlled by Office 365 administrators and integrations are starting to pile up quickly. With over 70 connectors that include GitHub, Evernote, Mailchimp, and Salesforce, Microsoft Teams is a major upgrade to the Enterprise Office 365 offering.

If your business is looking for a communications program that is secure, mobile-friendly, and can do more than your current solutions, consider reaching out to the IT professionals at WheelHouse IT for an assessment to see what solution would be best for your company. Our dedicated technicians can find you the best fit for the demands of your business. Give us a call today at (877) 771-2384 for more information.

Going Through the Pros and Cons of VoIP

Going Through the Pros and Cons of VoIP

Today, we will look at all the pros and cons of VoIP integration, and whether the promise of the technology matches up to the reality of deploying it.

There are few applications that have come along that are as attractive as VoIP is to a small business owner or administrator.

The promise of eliminating the recurring expense of a commercial phone bill, while using the bandwidth that’s already on the books seems like a complete no-brainer for a business, but there are some pitfalls that have to be sidestepped to get the most out of a VoIP solution.

What is VoIP?

VoIP, or voice over Internet protocol is exactly that. It is a phone system that uses your organization’s Internet connection to provide you with a phone platform and other features.

The Pros of VoIP

In theory, the pros of a VoIP solution far outweigh an enterprise-level phone system from a traditional telephone service provider. The biggest advantage a VoIP system has is the cost savings your organization will see.

While there are a lot of VoIP platforms available, the amount of money you are willing to spend will be commensurate with the features you receive from your VoIP solution. Some simpler consumer VoIP systems only allow you to make calls to other people using VoIP, while the majority of the options a business would use will allow for calls to anyone.

VoIP can cost an organization a lot of money if it insists on hosting the PBX system in house, but today the reliability of the cloud-hosted VoIP solutions can deliver everything an organization needs in a telephone system at a price that’s right. Additional VoIP features like call forwarding, call waiting, three-way calling, video, and data sharing are found in most VoIP options.

Another benefit of VoIP is that it can be used from multiple phones. Not only can you use a VoIP solution from a headphone and mic hooked into your computer, you can also get phone handsets that hook up to a computer giving VoIP users a choice about how they are going to communicate while in the office.

More than that, most VoIP solutions have dedicated applications that can run on mobile devices that can allow people to go mobile with their work number. This improves the ability for people to be on the move. Overall the number of benefits, for both an organization and its workers, is numerous.

The Cons of VoIP

With the laundry list of benefits, it’s hard to consider that there are some very poignant cons to consider. One is actually cost.

If you want to have a PBX server that you can control, you are going to have to buy one. This can be extraordinarily expensive and on top of the hardware costs, you will have to have someone who is competent to set up the platform, another huge cost. These cost concerns can be alleviated by sticking with a cloud-hosted VoIP platform.

Another qualification you have to consider is call quality. Since VoIP is a process of turning sound into data, delivering it to the user, and trans-coding it in virtual real time, some of the time the sound can be quantized and choppy, or experience lag. This is because data packets that are received sometimes aren’t in the proper order in which they were sent, a normal problem in data transmission, but when dealing with real-time calls, it can be somewhat bothersome.

These problems tend to happen when there isn’t enough bandwidth, or other networking limitations, supporting the system. As a result, an organization may be on the hook to upgrade their bandwidth if a lot of problems of sound quality happen early in the implementation.

Besides sound issues, some practical issues arise with VoIP. Of course, devices supporting the VoIP services have to be on and connected to the Internet to function. The last thing to mention is that there are times when emergency services are not available on the other end of a VoIP line. This is because the location of a caller can’t be determined like it would with a traditional phone system, or cellular network.

If you do have a VoIP service, make sure to have direct emergency numbers on hand to ensure you aren’t putting you or your staff in harm’s way.

Deploying a VoIP system makes a lot of sense for almost every business. Does your business use VoIP, or are you thinking about it?

If you are, contact the IT professionals at WheelHouse IT and we can give you some options to help you improve your business’ communications while cutting costs. Call us today at (877) 771-2384 for more information.