Cybersecurity guidance for small businesses in Rockland, Westchester & Bergen — ransomware protection, compliance, and practical security steps.
For most professional services firms, secure file sharing means sending sensitive client files through a SharePoint link restricted to named people, or through encrypted email, and keeping plain attachments for documents that wouldn’t matter if they went astray. A client portal earns its cost when the same exchange repeats with dozens of clients every season. … Read more
An IT roadmap for a 20-person business starts with a security baseline, then endpoint security, MFA on internet-facing accounts, locked-down admin accounts with a break-glass backup, and staff training. Hardware, licensing, backups, end-of-support dates, and the budget come after that. Most roadmaps start with a purchase. A new server. A laptop refresh. A move to … Read more
New Jersey’s data breach notification law, N.J.S.A. 56:8-161 to 56:8-166, requires any business conducting business in New Jersey to report a breach of residents’ unencrypted personal information to the State Police first, then notify those residents without unreasonable delay. That sentence carries most of the law. The detail is where small businesses get caught out. … Read more
When a firewall’s security subscription expires, what stops depends on the vendor and the license model. Some firewalls keep passing traffic and only lose threat updates and filtering. Others, once a grace period ends, can stop passing traffic entirely until they’re relicensed. Ask me what stops working and the first answer I give is the … Read more
Most Westchester small businesses answer to some mix of New York’s SHIELD Act, HIPAA, the DFS cybersecurity regulation, the FTC Safeguards Rule, and PCI DSS, and most of those rules ask for the same core controls. Which ones apply to you depends on your industry and the data you hold, not on the county. SHIELD. … Read more
A new hire is ready on day one when IT has already created their own Microsoft 365 account, prepared a managed laptop, planned their MFA sign-in, and granted only the files, mailboxes, and apps the job needs. Most onboarding work should be finished before the person walks in. Gallup reported in 2018 that only 12% … Read more
For a 50-person business already on Microsoft 365, identity and access management usually adds $4 to $14 per user per month in licensing, about $2,400 to $8,400 a year, plus a few hundred dollars once for hardware security keys. Most of what people picture when they hear “identity and access management” is priced for companies … Read more
Microsoft 365 Business Premium adds the security tools that Business Basic and Business Standard leave out, including Conditional Access through Entra ID P1, Intune, Defender for Business, data loss prevention, sensitivity labels, and Message Encryption. Standard’s step up from Basic is mainly the desktop apps, not stronger protection. Microsoft does sell some security products on … Read more
Letting employees pick their own laptops usually saves a little at the register and costs more over the machine’s life, in setup labor, security gaps, and support time, because every different model becomes its own small IT project. I understand why owners allow it. Someone new joins, they have strong opinions about keyboards, and a … Read more
Business email lands in spam when the receiving system can’t verify or trust the sender, either because your own domain lacks working SPF, DKIM, and DMARC, or because the invoice came from an app’s mail server, not yours. The first fix is finding out which of the two your invoices fall into. If your business … Read more
