Should Employees Use Personal Devices for Work?
Summary: Allow personal devices only for approved work, through approved apps, and when the device meets your security requirements. Use company-owned devices for administration, sensitive
Summary: Allow personal devices only for approved work, through approved apps, and when the device meets your security requirements. Use company-owned devices for administration, sensitive
Most owners only look at their IT when something has already gone wrong. A file won’t open, a laptop won’t start, or an invoice gets paid into a scammer’s account. Fixing it at that point costs more than preventing it would have.
Almost none of it happens without warning. The backup that fails when you finally need it had been failing for weeks. The account a scammer used belonged to someone who left last year. Thirty minutes a month IT check is usually enough to catch that kind of thing.
Small businesses are the most common ransomware target by volume of incidents, even though many small business owners assume hackers focus on larger organisations. A 22-person company has enough revenue to be worth attacking, no dedicated security team to defend it, and a publicly traceable footprint that takes about an hour to research.
What follows is a step-by-step walkthrough of how a small business gets attacked, written from the attacker’s side. The company in this account is composite, but the methods are accurate to current threat intelligence reporting. After the walkthrough, you’ll see five specific points where the attack would have been stopped by controls that come bundled with security tools most small businesses already pay for.
If you have a cyber insurance renewal coming up, the application is probably longer than the one you filled in last time. It’s also more specific. Each new question maps to a control that, if missing, allowed a major 2023 or 2024 claim to escalate. The wording reflects how carriers responded to losses they paid in 2023 and 2024, and how you answer the form matters more than it used to.
This post covers why the application got longer, what each new section is asking, how to answer honestly without overstating your controls, and what to fix in the 30 days before submission. The expensive mistake on a cyber insurance application is rescission, where a future claim is denied because the carrier finds that the controls you declared were not in place at the time.
In the traditional office, a “Clean Desk” policy was a simple habit: shred the sensitive stuff, lock it away, and don’t leave passwords where someone can see them.
In 2026, the same idea still matters but the “desk” has changed.
For many teams, the home office is now the default workspace, and that means physical access can quickly become digital access. An unlocked screen, a shared device, or a laptop left in the wrong place can expose the same systems your business runs on every day.
Clean Desk 2.0 isn’t about aesthetics. It’s about securing the physical-to-digital bridge.
If a houseguest, a delivery person, or a thief can sit down at your workstation, they don’t need to be a master hacker to cause real damage. They just need a few unattended minutes and an open session.
Guest Wi-Fi is a convenience your visitors expect and a hallmark of good customer service. But it’s also one of the riskiest points in your network. A shared password that’s been passed around for years offers virtually no protection, and a single compromised guest device can become a gateway for attacks on your entire business. That’s why adopting a Zero Trust approach for your guest Wi-Fi is essential.
The core principle of Zero Trust is simple but powerful: never trust, always verify. No device or user gains automatic trust just because they’re on your guest network. Here are some practical steps to create a secure and professional guest Wi-Fi environment.
The cloud makes it easy to create virtual machines, databases, and storage accounts with just a few clicks. The problem is, these resources are often left running long after they’re needed. This “cloud sprawl,” the unmanaged growth of cloud resources, can quietly drain your budget every month. According to Hashi Corp’s State of Cloud Strategy Survey 2024, the top reasons for this waste are lack of skills, idle or underused resources, and overprovisioning, which together drive up costs for businesses of all sizes.
Why Should I Care About Cloud Resources?
The business benefit is tangible and dramatic. While organisations struggle with cloud budgets exceeding limits by an estimated 17%, automation offers a clear path to control.
For example, a VLink saved a significant amount of money on its non-production cloud spend by implementing a rigorous cloud shutdown automation policy. This policy automatically powered down all development and test environments that were not explicitly tagged as ‘Production’ outside of normal business hours (8 AM to 6 PM). The savings from just this single automated action accounted for 40% off their non-production cloud spend, freeing up that budget for new growth initiatives.
Small businesses often struggle to leverage technology effectively. It can be a challenge just to survive, much less thrive. In many cases, they instinctively fall back on a reactive approach to IT challenges, rather than planning and acting proactively. That’s where an IT roadmap can help. It becomes a digital compass for organisations, a strategic document that provides alignment between technology needs, initiatives, and business goals.
An IT roadmap provides a vision of your business’s technology needs in the next 6, 12, and 24 months. This helps to prioritise needs and shape expenditures rather than blindly throwing money at technology. This is a critical step for small businesses with limited capital.
This article will explore why IT roadmapping is essential for business growth and how to build an effective one that aligns with long-term business goals.
What Is an IT Roadmap?
The IT roadmap is an outline for how technology will drive business objectives. It must include priorities and timelines, as well as system upgrades and cybersecurity plans.
An IT roadmap provides the following information:
What technologies are we using now?
What tools will we need in the future?
When should we invest in upgrades?
How do we improve our security posture?
What’s our long-term digital strategy?
Without a roadmap, organisations often make piec
The mass migration to cloud-based environments continues as organisations realise the inherent benefits. Cloud solutions are the technology darlings of today’s digital landscape. They offer a perfect marriage of innovative technology and organisational needs. However, it also raises significant compliance concerns for organisations. Compliance involves a complex combination of legal and technical requirements. Organisations that fail to meet these standards can face significant fines and increased regulatory scrutiny. With data privacy mandates such as Privacy Act 1988 in effect & guidelines from Essential 8, businesses must carefully navigate an increasingly intricate compliance landscape.
Cloud Compliance
This is the process of adhering to laws and standards governing data protection, security, and privacy. This is not optional. Unlike traditional on-site systems, cloud environments present security issues due to geographic data distribution, making compliance more complex.
Compliance in the cloud typically involves:
Securing data at rest and in transit
Ensuring data residency
Maintaining access controls and audit trails
Demonstrating adherence to regular assessments
Images of Black Friday no longer merely conjure up visions of bargain-hunting shoppers rushing storefronts to secure the best deals. It is now viewed by many organisations as a strategic opportunity to minimise the cost of upgrading their technology infrastructure. Traditionally, Black Friday tech deals surrounded gaming platforms and entertainment technology, but that has changed. Now, businesses recognise that there are numerous deals on the latest technology that offer real-world value to improve collaboration and productivity.
Whether adopting gaming hardware for creative workflows or adopting cutting-edge peripherals for hybrid teams, businesses need to recognise the opportunities for smart integration of these products.
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