Tag Archives: SMB

AVG

UK Government is addressing SMB cyber security needs, but are you doing enough?

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The scheme will offer micro, small and medium sized businesses up to £5,000 for specialist advice to boost their cyber security and protect new business ideas and intellectual property.

The initiative will also enable firms to access services from the UK cyber security industry, and help them to adopt Cyber Essentials, a government-backed, industry supported scheme to help organisations protect themselves against common cyber-attacks.

With small businesses still guilty of underestimating how valuable their data is to the global, cybercriminal network, I fully support the initiative and would advise any small business to take advantage of the offer. In the UK, many small businesses are still not investing significantly in cyber security measures – recent government figures suggest SMEs with 100 or more employees spend about £10,000 per year, while the smallest firms spend as little as £200.

It’s clear that more guidance is needed, and with so many resources now available there is no reason not to be better informed. I wonder if this news has prompted you to consider your own cyber security needs and if so, how many of you plan to sign up?

It would be great to see similar schemes rolled out beyond the UK, and I fully expect this will happen as security continues to rise further up the news agenda. For those not eligible for schemes such as this, I would advise you to adhere to the following best practices:

  • Educate your staff via in-person training sessions and by providing regularly updated resources on the threats landscape
  • Always make sure your customer data is stored in an encrypted database
  • Require multiple levels of passwords to access any database storing customer information; and change these passwords frequently
  • Regularly run background checks on employees handling customer data
  • Make sure to have malware detection software running on both your servers (hosted or not) and workstations and that it, and your operating systems, are regularly patched and updated
  • Review and implement the standard network security health check controls
  • Make sure your Crisis Management or Disaster Plan (which you should also have) includes a data breach plan

With the volume and scope of small business security threats on the rise, SMEs simply cannot afford to wait and risk becoming the next breach we read about in the morning papers. It’s great to see that government is taking further steps to address the cyber security issues SMBs face, but it’s an issue we all need to address – both as businesses and employees.

For more information on keeping your business safe, visit the AVG Business website.

Avast

Free software and services your start-up can use

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Get your small business up and running with free software.

Getting a new business off the ground is not an easy task and can be quite costly, but there are a lot of free software and services available online that your new or small business can use as an alternative to paid-for products.

Here is a list (in alphabetical order, so no favorites ;-) ) of some you will find useful:

Avast for BusinessAvast for Business – cloud-managed security

Avast not only provides consumers with free security, but we also provide small and medium sized businesses with free cloud-managed protection. Avast for Business is easy to install and can be managed from anywhere and at anytime.

Facebook Page – alternative to building your own website   
If you’re a restaurant owner or a small boutique you could also, either in addition to or instead of hosting your own website, create a Facebook page for your business. You won’t be able to sell items online, but you can add your business’ address and directions, opening hours, a description of your business and post images and status updates to inform your customers of new items on your menu or of new items available for sale in your store.

Fundera_LogoFundera – loans for your business
Fundera is a free service that offers you loan options and lets you choose the one best suited for your small business. All you need to do is fill out a short questionnaire and then you are presented with loan products, lenders and rates and can apply to the lenders that fit you best with only one application.

Hootsuite – social media manager
Using social media is a great way to get the word out about your budding business, and a social media manager is, therefore, very helpful to keep track of your sites and their effectiveness. Hootsuite offers a free starter package where you can add three social media platforms, get basic analytics reports and schedule posts.

weeblyJimdo and Weebly – (subdomain) website hosting
Jimdo and Weebly are both web hosting services that offer free starter packages when you create a website using their subdomain. With Jimdo’s free package you get 500MB of storage space, one password-protected area and mobile versions of your site. Weebly offers unlimited pages and a drag and drop builder. Both services offer the possibility to sell up to five items for free in case you want to use your site for ecommerce. Checkout services are also included for free.

Opeopenchart 1nCart – shopping cart solution
OpenCart is a free and open source shopping cart solution. All you need to do is install OpenCart, select your theme, add your products and you are ready to start selling your products on your website!

OpeopenofficenOffice – office suite
Apache OpenOffice is a great alternative to Microsoft’s Office Suite. OpenOffice is an open source office suite that includes essentials like a Word processor, spreadsheet, multimedia, graphics, database and math software. Best of all, OpenOffice is license-free and can be installed on as many computers as your business needs!

Orange HRM – human resource management software
Orange HRM is a free and open source software for human resource management. It is a full-featured HR management system offering various modules such as system administration, personnel information management, and recruitment.

Producteev – task manager
Producteev is a task manager that offers unlimited users, projects and tasks in its free version so you can ensure that you and your team stay on top of the most important to-dos to get your business up and running!

Suite CRM – customer relationship management
Suite CRM is free, open source software for customer relationship management. It’s based on Sugar CRM and comparable to Salesforce. It gives you a full overview, including products, quotes, contracts, projects, reporting, teams, workflow and much more.

wave-media-logoWave – accounting tools
Wave offers cloud-based invoicing, accounting, payroll and payments for free for businesses with 9 people or less. They finance their services by connecting small business owners with vendors of products and services that offer discounts to Wave users.

Nearly all of the above mentioned products also offer premium services your business can take advantage of as it grows. For now, we wish your business the best of luck and hope this list of free software helps your business. :-)

Avast

How one IT guy gained control of 500 devices with Avast for Business

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The rule of thumb for managing devices is one IT Administrator for every 100 computers or devices. Five hundred is difficult to manage for an entire IT department, let alone one IT Administrator. But, Gary Myers is up to the task.

The Avast team caught up with Myers recently to see what he thinks about the new Avast for Business product. “They say you should have one person for every 100 devices so it’s definitely a challenge.”

Gary explained how he chose new Avast for Business as his security solution. “I’ve been using Avast for a long, long time, so when I saw that there was a new business product, I knew I should give it a try.” Myers says that Avast is a step above the rest and he switched to Avast for Business because he wanted the new features of the cloud-based product.

Avast for Business web console

Our easy-to-use Web console lets you see and manage devices, reports, and alerts from anywhere.

Myers said the upside of the new cloud-managed antivirus is obvious. “I’m seeing advantages with the software being cloud-based. The web-console allows me to see everything I need to see at once and everything is up-to-date.”

Streamed updates and the cloud-managed console certainly make life easier for an IT administrator that manages as many devices as Myers.

Budget is often a huge factor when IT professionals purchase antivirus software but for Myers, the free product “works, and it’s low overhead.”

Avast for Business is completely free forever – which makes it the ultimate cost-cutting, money saver.

Sign up for Avast for Business and save money and time for your company.

 

 

Avast

BYOD increases the need for Anti-Theft protection

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smartphone and tablet

The convenience of BYOD can go down the drain if the employee loses their device. Protect it with Avast Anti-Theft.

Small business owners embrace the idea of employees supplying their own computers, smartphones, and tablets in the workplace. But the savings and convenience can go down the drain if the employee falls prey to a phishing scam and downloads malware or loses their device. Protecting mobile devices has become increasingly more important as Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) grows in popularity.

Technical security measures to protect information are of obvious importance. However, many security incidents relate to the theft or loss of equipment.

We can write multiple blog posts about BYOD policies and educating your employees about the latest threats and tricks that cybercrooks play (spearphishing, for example), which is all extremely important, but if you simply lose your device, then all bets are off anyway. You can avoid headaches in the case of misplaced or stolen devices by having a way to remotely locate the missing device and wiping the data away if it ends up in the wrong hands.

Avast Anti-Theft allows users to log on to their desktop account or use a friend’s phone to remotely locate their device, lock it, activate the remote siren, or wipe its data clean.

Learn 5 ways to thwart the thief who stole your Android.

Business owners also need to consider what to do about company data on an employee’s personal device when they are terminated or leave the company. Some companies have resorted to wiping personal devices clean of all data, but that includes contacts, family photos, apps and music, which can lead to unpleasant lawsuits or complaints from former employees. Mobile device management systems (MDMs) are available, but could be overkill for very small businesses.

If you only have a few employees, and do not require a full-blown MDM, then Install Avast Anti-Theft for free from the Google Play store to protect your own devices and those of your employees.

 

Avast

Avast for Business adds 75,000 new customers in just two months

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Avast for Business

Luke Walling, GM of Avast for Business, had confidence in the Avast for Business product all along. But the explosion of new customers has surprised and delighted even him.

Avast for Business is the industry’s first free, easy to use, cloud-managed security offering that protects small-to-medium-sized business (SMB) from cyber attacks and data breaches.

The new product has been available for two months, and already more than 75,000  SMB owners have enthusiastically selected Avast for Business to protect their companies.

The new, cloud-managed solution has specifically been adopted by IT consulting, education, and non-profit sectors. Early results also show a strong uptake in managed service providers, who make up 12 percent of Avast for Business’ total installed device count and 2.5 percent of its new users.

A reason for it’s booming success is because most start-ups, small businesses, schools, and nonprofit organizations lack the IT infrastructure to install costly and complex on-premise security solutions. Avast for Business provides the ideal solution. It’s easily scalable and managed from anywhere. Additionally, Avast for Business starts at a price everyone can afford: free, making it a natural fit for small-to-medium-sized businesses and organizations worldwide.

Avast for Business is free for as long as you want it and for an unlimited number of admins and devices. Protect your company with Avast for Business.

Avast for Business

Avast for Business replaces expensive, complicated security solutions for SMBs.

Avast

Why you need to protect your small business from hackers

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Avast Free Antivirus protects small and medium sized businesses for free.

IT pros have used Avast Free Antivirus at home for years. It’s not a huge leap to use free Avast for Business at their place of business.

Small and medium-sized businesses face a challenge when it comes to keeping their data secure. Many companies don’t have the budget to hire a Managed Service Provider (MSP) to take care of their IT needs, and often, they think they do not have enough knowledge or time to handle it themselves, therefore the path of least resistance is to not have any security at all. At the very best SMBs use a consumer version of antivirus software.

But these days, neither of those options is a good idea. Having no protection leaves you too vulnerable, and the problem with using a consumer product in a work environment is whoever is managing the network cannot look across all computers at once and implement policy changes or updates.

Do hackers really target small businesses?

The media coverage of big time data breaches like Target, Neiman Marcus, and Home Depot may have many SMB owners thinking that they are not at risk, but even small and medium-sized businesses need to make sure that their data and that of their customers is protected.

Here’s a statistic that should get your attention: One in five small businesses are a victim of cybercrime each year, according to the National Cyber Security Alliance. And of those, nearly 60% go out of business within six months after an attack. And if you need more convincing, a 2014 study of internet threats reported that 31% of businesses with fewer than 250 employees were targeted and attacked.

Why do hackers target small businesses?

Hackers like small businesses because many of them don’t have a security expert on staff, a security strategy in place, or even policies limiting the online activity of their employees. In other words, they are vulnerable.

Don’t forget that it was through a small service vendor that hackers gained access to Target’s network. Hackers may get your own customer’s data like personal records and banking credentials and your employee’s log in information, all the while targeting the bigger fish.

While hackers account for most of the data lost, there is also the chance of accidental exposure or intentional theft by an employee.

Avast for BusinessWhat can I do to protect my small business?

For mom-and-pop outfits, Avast for Business, a free business-grade security product designed especially for the small and medium-sized business owner, offers tremendous value. The management console is quite similar to our consumer products meaning that the interface is user-friendly but also powerful enough to manage multiple devices.

“Avast for Business is our answer to providing businesses from startup to maturity a tool for the best protection, and there’s no reason for even the smallest of companies not to use it, because it starts at a price everyone can afford, free,” said Luke Walling, GM and VP of SMB at Avast.

Some companies may still opt to pay for a MSP, and in many cases, especially for medical or legal organizations, handing over administration to a third-party may be a good way to go. Either way, our freemium SMB security can be used, and if you use a MSP then the savings can be passed on to you.

Is free good enough for a business?

Many IT professionals have been using free security on their home computers for years. It’s not such a huge leap of faith to consider the benefits of making the switch in their businesses as well.

“I have been using Avast since 2003 at home, with friends, with family. You really come to trust and know a product over the years. It lends itself to business use really well, nothing held back,” said Kyle Barker of Championship Networks, a Charlotte-area MSP.

How do I get Avast for Business?

Visit Avast for Business and sign up for it there.

AVG

How BYOD is building business without walls

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I’ve just googled “Bring Your Own Device” and “BYOD” and got more than 150 million results. It’s fair to say that this is a hot topic. The industry has long agreed – the BBC included Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) in its 2012 technology predictions (or at least one of its commentators did) and did so again for 2013.

In a relatively short period of time (Wikipedia claims the term was coined in 2009) BYOD has become a well-used business term – both at enterprise level and in the small- and medium-sized business (SMB) space where AVG Business operates. Many of us want to use our own device for work purposes, so businesses of all sizes need to allow their employees to do so. Consequently, it’s up to us and our partners to enable this by making the BYOD ecosystem secure.

I am old enough to remember when I had to crawl under a desk to plug an ethernet cable into the back of a PC tower. Security in those days meant four walls and a locked door.

Today users want the flexibility and speed that cloud apps bring, often on their own smartphone or tablet. As I said in my last blog, Dropbox, Gmail and Skype are very popular tools which help businesspeople do what businesspeople do best – run their businesses.  But how secure are they?

Our job at AVG Business, through our partners is to give our customers the right tools to do just that, to make technology simple and secure, and to enable them to have control over their business.

I am hugely looking forward to presenting at AVG Business’s Mobile Security Forum at Mobile World Congress next week – I will be talking about BYOD in the context of the SMB community and discussing how we’ll introduce control and flexibility so that businesspeople can concentrate on their core business.

Avast

Wanted: Avast for Business beta testers

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Join our Avast for Business beta test program and prove its value to your company.

IMG_9675
In 2001, we began our journey toward becoming the leader in consumer desktop security by doing things differently and delivering a great product for free. Today, we protect more than 175 million home computers, more than anyone else.

In 2011, we began our journey toward becoming the leader in mobile security by doing things differently and delivering a great product for free. Today, we protect more than 50 million smartphones, making us one of the top 2 mobile security providers and well on our way to becoming number one.

In 2015, we start our next journey – this one toward becoming the leader in business security. And we’ll do so by doing things differently and delivering a great product for…

…well, keep an eye on this space. We’ve clearly shown that when we focus our efforts, we know how to deliver differentiated solutions that become market leaders despite stiff competition.

We don’t do any of this by ourselves though. Over the years, we have listened to our evangelists on the forum, our fans on social media, consumer reviews, and the people who test out our products before they are released. We gather feedback, opinions, and suggestions and integrate those into Avast products.

Now we’re doing it again.

Avast Software will turn business information security on its head with our new business-grade security product designed specifically for small and medium sized businesses. But first, we need your help.

Join our beta test program for Avast for Business and prove its value to your company.

Here’s what you get:

  • YOU GET EARLY ACCESS  – As a participant in the Avast for Business beta program, you have exclusive access to the pre-release version. You get to be the first one to experience the power and ease-of-use of Avast for Business.
  • YOU HELP US CREATE THE BEST SECURITY SOLUTION FOR YOUR BUSINESS – When you join our beta test team, you’re first in line with suggestions for improving the product, now and into the future..
  • YOU GET REWARDED FOR YOUR EFFORTS –To thank you for your participation in our beta program, and compensate your business for the time you invest, we’ll give you three full months of Premium service after the release of the new product in 2015.

How to join the program

  • Review the information about Avast for Business on our website
  • Click on SIGN UP NOW
  • Follow the on-screen instructions and start putting Avast for Business to work
  • Send us your feedback via email to [email protected].

As much as is feasible without delaying the product release, we’ll incorporate your comments into Avast for Business; other suggestions will be reserved for incorporation into future releases. And your business name will be added to the list of companies that will receive three months of Premium service after the product is released.

Avast Software’s security applications for PC, Mac, and Android are trusted by more than 200-million people and businesses. Please follow us on Facebook, Twitter and Google+.

AVG

AVG Technologies Announces New Managed Workplace® Enhancements to Partners at Cloud Summit

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AVG’s RMM platform continues to evolve to give partners even tighter applications’ integration experience, reducing cost and complexity

AMSTERDAM and SAN FRANCISCO – October 23, 2014 – AVG Technologies N.V. (NYSE: AVG), the online security companyâ„¢ for 182 million active users, today gave partners attending its Cloud Summit in Arizona a first-look preview of key new features in AVG Managed Workplace®9.0, its open eco-system Remote Management & Monitoring (RMM) tool for IT resellers and managed services providers (MSPs).

Following continued close consultation with its partner-base, AVG is unveiling a number of significant technical refinements to its RMM platform that will enable MSPs to deliver an even more tightly integrated range of streamlined services through the same integrated management console.

Key advances among the new integration features and benefits for MSPs of the enhanced AVG Managed Workplace RMM platform are:

  • Increased automation – extends automation best practices in a scalable, repeatable manner to transform an MSP’s service delivery, thereby reducing the cost of creating and maintaining secure compliant devices
  • Enhanced reporting and alerting – refinements in automated, real-time alerting increase quality and breadth of data available to enable a fast, focused response to help remediate issues before they have a chance to escalate, helping to save time and money.
  • Boosted patch management – increases in efficiency of patch scheduling ability help proactively close the gap between patch availability and patch application, reducing vulnerabilities on individual devices and avoiding costs.

“Recent industry events like Shellshock and Gameover Zeus have shown businesses that it is still best to leave your IT in the hands of experts,” said Mike Foreman, General Manager, SMB, AVG Technologies. “Incorporating the constructive feedback from our partners, combined with a set of technical enhancements to our RMM platform provides our partners with enhanced levels of protection and control that will let their customers sleep at night.”

AVG’s business security portfolio is supported by a worldwide network of more than 10,000 partners.  Its pedigree in this area makes it ideally positioned to help smaller IT companies and MSPs harness low cost, cloud-based tools so they can transition into fully-fledged managed services businesses.

In October 2012 AVG introduced AVG CloudCare™, a cloud-based administration platform offering resellers a new way to implement and manage services such as antivirus, content filtering, online backup and email security services for their business customers. In June 2013 it added AVG Managed Workplace, an open eco-system Remote Management & Monitoring (RMM) tool. AVG‘s vision is to make the lives of MSPs and their business customers as easy as possible, regardless of whether staff are in the office, at home, or on the road.

AVG Managed Workplace 9.0 is scheduled for general availability from November 2014.

About AVG Technologies (NYSE: AVG)

AVG is the online security company providing leading software and services to secure devices, data and people.  AVG has over 182 million active users, as of June 30, 2014, using AVG’s products and services including Internet security, performance optimization, and personal privacy and identity protection. By choosing AVG’s products, users become part of a trusted global community that engages directly with AVG to provide feedback and offer mutual support to other customers.