The Three Who Became One

Sept 19 2023 - We are happy to announce the creation of Campfire Technology Inc. created by three existing Apple focused MSPs. Campfire Technology Group (Winnipeg), Berti Group Inc. (Calgary), and At Your Server Ltd. (The Greater Toronto Hamilton Area).

At Your Server Ltd., is merging together with Berti Group Inc., and Campfire Technology Group Inc. to form one unified organization named Campfire Technology Inc. (DBA Campfire)

We extend our heartfelt gratitude to all our customers who have stood by us throughout these years. We are currently in an exciting phase, as we are confident that this development will significantly elevate our service offerings. In an era where technology is pivotal to the success of businesses, we acknowledge the continuously evolving complexities that accompany this growth. To preserve our fundamental commitment to integrity and customer-focused approach, it has been essential for us to fortify our team with individuals who share our core values.

Our expanded team, now comprising of approximately 18 members, will be strategically positioned across Canada, with a presence in Calgary, Winnipeg, and the Greater Toronto Hamilton Area.

Security Questions Your Organization Should Be Asking Itself

We’re increasingly hearing from organizations that need to establish that they have sufficient security policies in place, either to meet the requirements of a larger client or to qualify for cyber insurance that insures against breaches and similar losses. Details vary, and we’re happy to work with you on the specifics, but here are some of the kinds of questions you may be asked. Of course, if you don’t have to prove that you’re doing the right thing to some other company, answering these questions for yourself can only improve your security readiness.

Do you enroll all organizational devices in a device management solution?

With device management, an IT department or managed services provider (MSP) maintains oversight and control over all organizational devices. That’s helpful for automating configuration and deployment, providing secure access to organizational resources, ensuring consistent security policies, managing app and operating system updates, tracking device inventory and status, and much more.

Do you have an organization-wide backup strategy with offsite backups?

Regular backups—some stored offsite—are essential if you need to recover from lost or stolen hardware, a natural disaster, or a ransomware attack. Even though ransomware isn’t currently a major problem in the Mac world, it wouldn’t hurt to start creating immutable backups using “write once, read many” tape or something like Retrospect’s Cloud Object Lock, a technology that ensures that cloud-based backups can’t be corrupted. Finally, have you tested restoration and recovery of key systems from your backup data? Backup is important, but only if you can restore.

Do you have a policy for updates?

It’s essential to install security-related updates to operating systems and major apps, but how quickly that happens has to be weighed against problems that version changes can cause for important workflows. There’s no right answer here, but you want to make sure that you aren’t leaving your organization’s apps and devices vulnerable to known security exploits for longer than necessary.

Do you have a strong password management policy?

Short, easily guessed, or cracked passwords are one of the primary ways attackers breach corporate networks and systems. At minimum, your password management policy should require that all passwords be stored in a password manager, new passwords be generated by the password manager and meet minimum requirements for strength, and two-factor authentication be used when available.

Do you use an endpoint protection platform?

Endpoint protection is essentially software aimed at preventing and detecting malware on employee workstations, often with an organizational dashboard and management capabilities. Although the Mac doesn’t have nearly the exposure to malware that Windows does, it’s still important to keep computers free of malware that could hurt performance, exfiltrate data, or provide an entry point for future attacks. Endpoint protection is usually part of a larger managed systems approach that can also ensure that devices adhere to security policies like full disk encryption, run only approved software, stay up to date with security updates, and more.

Do you have a list of sensitive data on your network?

Exactly what counts as sensitive data will vary by organization, but anything related to network and corporate security qualifies, as does any personally identifiable information you may hold about or for clients. It’s not uncommon to store information about people that includes names, email addresses, phone numbers, and postal addresses, but you should be even more careful if you store Social Security numbers, credit card numbers, driver’s licenses, passports, financial records, or medical records. Knowing what you have is the first step; after that, consider what additional precautions you should take to protect such information.

Do you provide periodic anti-fraud and security training to employees?

Social engineering is another common way attackers gain access to corporate networks and systems. Does your organization require that all employees take regular training to learn how to identify phishing attacks, require appropriate approvals for unusual transactions or access requests, and report suspected incidents to the necessary people? If an administrative aide in the accounting department gets an email request from the CEO to pay an urgent invoice to a new vendor, will that person know how to respond?

Do you allow access to organizational email and systems from personal devices?

It’s tempting to allow users to access their email from personal devices or to have contractors use their personal email addresses for work communications. We recommend keeping as clear a line as possible between work and personal devices and accounts to reduce the security implications of such mixing. Particularly when there’s sensitive information in play, personal email addresses should never be used for work communications, and if personal devices are being used, they should be set up with two-factor authentication for organizational logins.

Do you have incident and disaster response plans?

Bad things happen, and it’s important to consider how you would respond to different types of security incidents and natural disasters. How will your organization maintain crucial business operations, communicate with employees, coordinate with partners (insurance, legal, PR, and clients), and more? Is your plan written down and updated regularly? Have you tested key aspects of your plan?

We know there’s a lot to think about regarding security in today’s world, and we’re always available to help if you’d like assistance answering any of the above questions.

(Featured image by iStock.com/Bulat Silvia)

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Two Ways to Manage Your Email So You Can Find It Later

We recently wrote about different ways to organize your files, which prompted some people to ask us about the best ways to manage email. Email may have competition from messaging services like Slack and Microsoft Teams, but for many people, it’s still where the most important communications take place. That’s especially true for anyone who has to work with numerous people outside their organization—there’s a reason why business cards nearly always contain an email address.

As with file organization, how you manage and organize your email is all about making it easier to find a specific message or conversation later. The big difference between files and email is that you usually care about how other people will be able to find and work with your files. With email, however, you’re the only person who has to sort through your messages. Imagine you run an ad agency that has the Belvedere Hotel as a client—your organizational structure for files needs to work for all your colleagues, but no one but you needs to find your email message about what should change in the next print ad campaign.

When managing email so you can find what you want later, most people gravitate to filing messages in mailboxes (sometimes called folders) or searching, though we find that a combination is usually best.

Find Email in Mailboxes

Many people have traditionally used a hierarchical filing structure to organize their email, creating a mailbox for each project. (There’s generally little benefit in creating mailboxes for people or date ranges because it’s easy to search for messages from specific people or between certain dates.)

So, much as with files, you might have a top-level mailbox for Clients and a sub-mailbox for each client, including the Belvedere Hotel. You could make additional sub-mailboxes for different Belvedere Hotel projects, but unless you expect to receive a lot of email for each of those projects, increasing the depth of the hierarchy is often unnecessary and extra work.

It’s unnecessary because date sorting options usually make it easy to home in on the message you want even when the mailbox contains hundreds of messages. Plus, the more granular your filing approach, the more manual filing you’ll have to do to ensure that every message ends up in the right place. Worse, many messages will likely cross projects, as could happen in a discussion of a print ad when your contact mentions that they want to reuse the text and graphics in the next email blast too. Should it go in a Print Ads mailbox or an Email Blasts mailbox? Don’t waste time deciding—just leave it in a general Belvedere Hotel mailbox.

How do messages end up in these mailboxes? You can always file messages manually, and you’ll spend some time doing that, no matter what. However, whenever possible, you want to create rules (also known as filters) that file messages automatically. Rules look through every incoming message and take actions—including moving to a mailbox—on messages that match the criteria you specify. For sanity’s sake, you want to make your rules as general as possible.

For instance, you could make a rule that moved messages from your contact at the Belvedere Hotel to your associated mailbox. That would work initially, but it would fail if you regularly work with multiple people there or if someone else fills in while your contact is on vacation. So instead of creating a rule that looks for a specific email address or even a set of email addresses, set your rule to look for all messages from the belvederehotel.com domain.

Let’s assume a colleague asks you for details on the latest Belvedere Hotel print ad. How do you find that information? Here’s how we’d go about it:

1. Open the Belvedere Hotel mailbox, sort by date if necessary, and scroll through the list of recent messages. Most of the time, the message you need to find has arrived recently, and you’ll remember the sender and subject well enough to pick it out.

2. If you can’t identify the message quickly by scanning, search for it based on the sender or recipient, date, and keywords. Look first within the mailbox where you think the message is located, but if that fails, broaden the search to all your mailboxes.

The reason to start with a scan of the mailbox is that it’s usually the most efficient. However, if you know a message is old or can’t remember the sender, you may be better off starting with a search.

If you can’t easily build rules to move most of your email into the appropriate mailboxes, that’s a hint that a search-first approach might work better for you. You shouldn’t be spending a lot of your time filing email—that’s what computers are for!

Search for Email

When Google launched Gmail in 2004, the company introduced a new way of managing email that leveraged the company’s strength in search. The subsequent popularity of Gmail—which now has over 1.8 billion active users worldwide—means that a great number of people now default to searching when they want to find particular email messages, regardless of which email service they use.

A search-first approach can be fast and effective and doesn’t require that you file messages into mailboxes. For instance, if you always get email about Belvedere Hotel ad campaign details from the same person, it may be faster to search for email from that person first, rather than looking through a mailbox.

Searching rather than browsing for email works best for people whose work doesn’t break down neatly into categories or regularly cuts across multiple projects. But it’s not for everyone. For a search-first approach to be effective:

1. You must have the sort of brain that remembers details to use as search terms. If you’re more in the “I know it when I see it” camp, you may find searching less effective.

2. Your email must contain sufficiently unusual keywords that searching for a person and a keyword or two is likely to find the message you want.

3. You have to keep most messages. That may seem obvious, but if you delete a lot of incoming messages, you’ll likely remember messages you won’t be able to find.

4. Your email app must search quickly and accurately. Gmail is the gold standard, but other email apps have decent search capabilities.

Although we’re all familiar with searching in Google—and if you like searching the Web, you’ll probably like searching your email—a few tricks will make your email searches more likely to succeed:

1. Start with a focused search term—usually a person or unique keyword—that’s the most likely to give you the smallest number of results to scan for the message you want.

2. When searching for a person’s name, if your email app offers to autocomplete to that person’s email address, let it. This is because searching for “smith” is much less likely to work well than “johnqsmith1999@example.com.”
   

1. You can specify whether the person for whom you’re searching was the sender or the recipient, which helps reduce the number of results for people who appear regularly in your email.

2. If you’re looking for an attached file, you can usually specify that your search should return only messages that contain attachments, perhaps even just specific file types.

3. When you can’t remember much about the contents of the desired message, try to remember surrounding details, such as when the message might have been sent or who else might have received it, and add those terms to your search.

Precisely how you formulate these searches will vary by email app, but check these pages for details on using Mail, Outlook, and Gmail.

Choose the Best of Both Worlds

In reality, neither solely browsing through mailboxes nor relying entirely on search is likely to be satisfying. Those who file everything will find themselves needing to search within mailboxes at times, and those who prefer searching may find that using rules to store easily identified messages in associated mailboxes (mailing lists, for instance, or all email from your organization’s domain) makes searching easier.

(Featured image by iStock.com/anyaberkut)

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