A new survey has underlined the growing importance of digital technology to businesses of all size.
The British Chambers of Commerce Digital Economy Survey questioned more than 1,400 businesses across the UK and found that 84% of firms say digital and IT skills are more important to their business than two years ago, with 51% saying these skills are ‘significantly’ more important.
However, the survey also found that 20% of businesses had been hit by a cyber-attack in the past 12 months. Big businesses are far more likely than their smaller counterparts to be victims of attacks (42% of companies with more than 100 staff, compared to 18% of companies with fewer than 99 employees).
We agree that digital technology is playing its part to support the growth of the UK economy but that companies also need to maintain their security.
Bowe Digital offers a range of IT solutions that can help businesses take advantage of digital opportunities and we can also advise on ways to avoid falling foul of hackers.
Call us on 0191 214 1750 or email info@bowe.co.uk to find out how.
Bowe Digital – we make I.T. happen
The importance of innovation was underlined when Business Secretary Greg Clark recently named the winners of the Queen’s Awards for Enterprise in celebration of Her Majesty The Queen’s 91st birthday.
One hundred and seventy-six businesses from across the UK were recognised for their contribution to international trade, innovation and , sustainable development in industries from green energy solutions and medical healthcare, to laser technology and digital marketing. Fifty seven won the innovation award.
Greg Clark said: “We have some of the best Action AC entrepreneurs and innovative minds in the world who are at the heart of small start-ups providing excellent customer service to larger businesses developing global solutions.”
We salute them because innovation is key to the success of our economy. Digital technology is playing a key role in promoting innovation and we like to think that we are playing our part. Bowe Digital offers a range of IT solutions that can help manufacturing companies streamline their operations to run smartly, efficiently, and grow.
· Call us on 0191 214 1750 or email info@bowe.co.uk to find out how.
· Bowe Digital – we make I.T. happen
The latest national CBI Industrial Trends Survey shows expectations for growth standing at a two-decade high
The survey of 423 firms found that export order books were the highest since December 2013, driven by a broad-based strengthening of which half was accounted for by the pharmaceutical and mechanical engineering sectors. Total order books remained firm in March, after strengthening to a two-year high in February.
Output growth rose at its quickest pace since July 2014 in the three months to March, with manufacturers anticipating that it will accelerate further over the near-term. Meanwhile, firms’ expectations for selling price inflation remain elevated for the quarter ahead.
Anna Leach, CBI Head of Economic Intelligence, said: “Innovation continues to be a fundamental driver of UK competitiveness and productivity gains and will influence the success of UK companies over the longer term.”
We could not agree more. We believe that innovative digital technology is playing its part to support this continuing growth, and Bowe Digital offers a range of IT solutions that can help businesses take advantage.
Call us on 0191 214 1750 or email info@bowe.co.uk to find out how.
Bowe Digital – we make I.T. happen
According to a survey commissioned by electronics giant Samsung, the biggest frustration for office workers is problems with poorly-performing technology.
Out of 1,000 office workers surveyed about their biggest workplace irritations, a staggering 92% said that crashing computers and slow internet annoyed them and resulted in them losing almost half an hour of working time a day on average.
Consultancy Censuswide questioned 1,000 workers from UK firms with under 250 employees. Ten per cent of those surveyed said they had left a job because of technology frustrations.
We say it need not come to that. Our IT support services use advanced remote monitoring and preventative maintenance technologies to keep infrastructure optimised. Issues can be identified, reported, and resolved in real time.
Call us on 0191 214 1750 or email info@bowe.co.uk to find out more.
A new CBI survey of more than 8,000 businesses – supported by Deloitte and Hays – shows that 70% of respondents plan to increase or maintain their innovation spending following the vote to leave the EU.
Last year business invested almost £21bn on innovation, allowing British firms to develop cutting-edge products and services, attract global investment and expand internationally.
Carolyn Fairbairn, CBI Director-General, said: “Innovation is the nucleus of future economic and social development so it’s encouraging that seven out of ten firms will keep up – or even raise – their spending on new technologies and work practices to grow their business.
“As we prepare to depart the EU, this shows that firms are rolling up their sleeves and looking to make the best of Brexit.”
For many companies, innovation means investing in digital technology. Bowe Digital offers a range of IT solutions that can help companies improve their agility and efficiency.
Call us on 0191 214 1750 or email info@bowe.co.uk to find out how.
Bowe Digital – we make I.T. happen
The leader of a small businesses organisation has welcomed the recent launch of the Government’s strategy against cybercrime but warned that SMEs still need more protection.
The Federation of Small Businesses (FSB) said the National Cyber Security Strategy was welcome because small businesses are the victims of more than seven million cyber crimes a year, costing £5.26 billion annually.
FSB National Chairman Mike Cherry said:“When a small business is attacked, it can lead to weeks of delayed or lost orders, significant financial loss and damaged reputations. It’s an absolute necessity for businesses and Government to work together to increase the resilience of the small business community to help them get back on their feet after an attack.”
Bowe Digital can help protect your IT system against the latest cyber threats. Call us on 0191 214 1750 or email info@bowe.co.uk to find out how. Can you afford not to?
Bowe Digital – we make I.T. happen
The UK Government has launched a new Cyber Security Information Sharing Partnership (CISP), which aims to protect the nation from cyber attacks.
The partnership will bring together government experts, cyber-crime specialist and industry to share intelligence on the latest cyber security threats.
Francis Maude, the Cabinet Office Minister responsible for the Cyber Security Strategy, said when launching CISP: “We know that cyber attacks are happening on an industrial scale and businesses are by far the biggest victims of cyber crime in terms of industrial espionage and intellectual property theft with losses to the UK economy running into the billions of pounds annually.”
Bowe Digital can help protect your IT system against the latest cyber threats now.
Call us on 0191 214 1750 or email info@bowe.co.uk to find out how. Can you afford not to?
Bowe Digital – we make I.T. happen
Author – Be Everywhere
Understanding password strength and security
It’s becoming more and more common that when you sign up for any account online you see a password strength meter. They come in various shapes and sizes and are coded with varying restrictions that measure how easy your password would be to crack. Password strength meters work by measuring entropy, which shows the amount of time it would take for a hacker to get your password by using a brute force method. Also known as an “exhaustive key search” this process is basically a systematic attempt to guess all possible passwords until they find the correct one.
Exhaustive key search method for cracking passwords
Imagine you pop to the shops and lock your pushbike to the rails outside it using a padlock secured with a 4-digit code. If someone wants to steal your bike there is a finite number of possible ‘passwords’ that they can cycle through (pun intended) until they find the right one. The brute force method of stealing your bike would be to get a chainsaw and cut through the railing, but the brute force method of hacking your password would be to start by trying ‘0000’, then ‘0001’, then ‘0002’ and continue all the way up to ‘9999’. At some point the would-be thief/hacker would find the right password and they’d ride home on your bicycle.
Except, if your password is way up in the 8000s then it’s going to take the thief an age to try that many combination, and you’ll probably have finished your weekly shop by the time he’s even halfway through the possibilities.
In a theoretical universe where there are 100 thieves trying to get your bike, and they can all try a password combination simultaneously, then they’ll be away with your bike before you even pick up the shopping basket. One bike between 100 of them will be uncomfortable, mind you.
This multi-pronged attack is more relevant to computer based passwords, where it’s realistic that the computer can attempt a tonne of possible passwords in a very short amount of time. Password strength checkers like zxcvbn can show just how quickly a computer can guess your password. For the example password ‘fountain’ (admittedly not a very good one) a computer guessing 100 iterations per hour could crack the password in half a day. If it was guessing 10,000 passwords a second then it would be cracked in under a second.
This is why text only passwords are usually highly disregarded, and a lot of websites won’t even let you create an account with a text only password. Instead, you’re encouraged to increase the strength of your password with disguising factors like capitals, numbers, and symbols. On the ‘howsecureismypassword’ password checker the word ‘fountain’ was cracked instantly, but “Fountain123!” was cracked in 34 thousand years.
This measure of entropy is one way to see how quickly a computer could crack a password, but if we go back to the bike thief analogy, that thief knows that it’s far more likely that you’ve set your padlocks password to something memorable like ‘7777’ or ‘2468’, so he’s probably going to try a sequential, or palindromic pattern before he tries the brute force method of 0001, 0002, 0003. So don’t make your password 7777 or 1234 or 2468, and don’t make it 0001 either. If the thief really, really wants your bike then he might have done his research and found out when your birthday was – so don’t make the password your birthday either.
Common passwords
This mentality translates to computer passwords, too. Everyone knows that the most common password is ‘password’, yet people still use it. So a hacker will go straight to ‘password’ before he tries ‘aaaaaaaa’. On the internet you can find a list of the 10,000 most common passwords, and if hackers are trying to access your account they’ll cycle through these before they do anything else. A recent study showed that 30% of all passwords fall on the list of the 10,000 most common. Knowing the restrictions that websites have in place, hackers will also try variations of these common p@s5w0RD!S!S! that fall within the restrictions.
Combining all of this, we see that ‘Fountain123!’ isn’t actually as strong as that password checker suggested. The numbers are sequential, and the format of having the capital letter at the front and an exclamation mark at the end is a very standard way that people try to disguise passwords. It may have passed the brute force test, but a hacker with external knowledge would find it a lot easier to crack.
The strongest and safest passwords
So, after all that am I telling you that your password should be… *ahem*…ADF%$gwsdfgsdge5te45yFgxdfgsDFSDGdg54gsfgsdfgs2343£$?%”£$%”£?
No. Because you won’t remember that well enough to re-type it in the ‘repeat password’ validation, let alone be able to repeat it every time you visit the site. Instead, it’s suggested that passwords should actually be memorable ‘passphrases’ with all of the number, symbol, and case boxes ticked.
An example here would be that “Fountains123!” wasn’t actually a very strong password, but “FountainBikes!157” would take 93 trillion years to crack, and with passwords, longer is generally better. So by the https://howsecureismypassword.net/ password checker “PadlockThiefFountainBikes!157” is even better, and would take 4 undecillion years to crack.
For the record, depending on where you’re from, an undecillion is a 1 followed by either 36 or 66 zeroes. And there’s four of them. That’s a long time.
Sure, if a hacker has four undecillion computers to hack you with, then it’d only take them a year to get in. But in that case they must really, really want to read your emails – and just imagine the electricity bill.
PadlockThiefFountainBikes!157 passes the brute force test for password strength, as well as the human test. As a string of words it’s easy to remember but hard to crack because there’s no logical connection between them. The punctuation isn’t predictable and the number isn’t sequential or meaningful. It would take a hacker so long to get in that he’d just move on to the next guy long before he got anywhere near your information.
Follow this advice to choose the best passwords and stay safe online.
Author – James Norman
Website – http://blogs.fasthosts.co.uk/online-security/password-strength/
Sage Software, the financial accounting software vendor, has recently held its 2016 Sage Summit in Chicago. Over double the size of last year’s event in New Orleans, what did the event have to say about Sage’s future?
In many ways, not a lot. The headline speeches were largely around bringing in A-List celebrities (Gwyneth Paltrow, Zooey Deschanel, Ashton Kutcher, Sir Richard Branson) alongside inspirational people from the world of the Invictus Games and Sage’s own Sage Foundation. In amongst these sessions were dotted little snippets of product information.Was this a case of there not being any real news to give? Actually no – it was a clever strategy of getting Sage’s brand better known in the US where its problem is that many of its own customers still see it as Peachtree, and are not really aware of what else Sage has to offer.
Was this a case of there not being any real news to give? Actually no – it was a clever strategy of getting Sage’s brand better known in the US where its problem is that many of its own customers still see it as Peachtree, and are not really aware of what else Sage has to offer.
Last year was really a case of Sage CEO, Stephen Kelly, making a lot of noise to show that Sage had finally arrived at the cloud computing party. Sage Live and Sage One were front and centre, with lots of noise around the ‘c’ versions of Sage 50, 100 and 300. This was to try and head off the encroaching threat of web-native companies such as Xero, KashFlow and others – and it seems to have had a measure of success.
This year was far more a story of maturation and evolution. Cloud was presented as a given, although Kelly was still keen to ensure that everyone understood that Sage will not force any company to move from an on-premise version of its software to the cloud – ever. Sage will obviously make it more and more attractive for companies to make such a move – it will compensate its channel more for moving customers over; it will ensure that companies are aware of the extra capabilities that a globally shared platform can offer in B2B and B2C trading and so on.
The question is, will Sage ever start to purposefully not add specific functionality to its on-premise systems so as to make remaining on that platform not only less favourable but also less viable for its more conservative customers? Only time will tell.
So, what was new? New customer characterisations – out with SMB, mid-market and larger customers. It was stated that the customer base did not really identify with the terminology (something that Quocirca can also attest to). Instead, we now have start-up and scale-up segments. Nothing too startling about this – but it may well play well with companies that want to be seen as more dynamic than an “SMB”.
At the product level, Kelly was keen to focus on how he sees the need to continue to rationalise the product portfolio, bringing it down from the close to 300 products that were around what was effectively a global federation of different companies before he joined. This is being done by building out on an open API strategy, which decouples the front end (system of engagement) from the back end (system of record) so providing much greater flexibility going forward.
To the Cloud!
This also enables Sage to make a better play for building an app marketplace – it is introducing a new Integration Cloud that purportedly will allow code-less integration of Sage, public cloud and on-premise systems. If this works as promised, Sage will be able to be a cloud aggregator and broker.
This could, however, bring its own issues. Look at the majority of existing app marketplaces out there. It is worse than cable television – you think you know what you want, but finding it is difficult. You find something that you think is what you want, but it is badly put together and presented. You find just what you want, but it is in a different language. And so on.
Sage will need to be the honest broker in the middle, making the identification of what app is best for the user as easy as possible. It needs to empower the Sage community to rank and score apps to weed out those that are not up to the job. It needs to ensure that it doesn’t allow any third party to water down its stated commitment to joining its customers in a strategy of trust and security.
This could be further complicated based on some of the working examples Sage showed from its integrations with other products. One showed how it integrated into TomTom Fleet Manger, tracking an employee’s movements for mileage expenses and so on. It was said that this could also then be integrated into a time charging model, for example where a professional services employee enters a customer’s building and so can automatically starting charging the customer for their time.
This is great – as long as it all works and does not become seen as too ‘Big Brother’ by the employee. If it doesn’t work, identifying the root cause and remediating it could be difficult – and who gets it in the neck? Probably Sage.
The rise of the Bot.
The most interesting announcement, though, was something that was very innovative – not only for an accounting company but any company. Sage has brought in a very bright person, Kriti Sharma, to look at how artificial intelligence and machine learning can be brought into the world of financial systems. To this end, Sharma has developed Pegg, a bot. Somewhat of a mix of Cortana/Siri and TripIt, Pegg can take input from (at the moment) Slack and Facebook Messenger.
Why? Well, consider expenses – many companies such as SAP Concur (which owns TripIt) and KDS have worked on automating the expense process as much as possible – and yet users still struggle with it. By using a bot, it is possible to more quickly input the expense details in natural English, and Pegg will then deal with the intelligence required to sort it out and post it to the expense system.
Sharma is fully aware of the security and other issues that there could be around this, and also keenly aware of the possible power in a natural language interface to financial accounting processes that there is there as well. As such, she is ensuring that it is a case of small steps being taken to find out what users really want, how those requirements are dealt with and how security is managed along the entire process.
So, is Sage now safe? Not completely, but it is definitely not the turkey waiting to be stuffed. It still has plenty of progress to make, but as was pointed out, the majority of start-up and scale-up organisations around the globe are still using Microsoft Excel and other not-fit-for-purpose means of accounting.
The devil is in the detail – but Sage seems to be positioning itself as an interesting ingredient in an organisation’s business recipe.
Author – Clive Longbottom
Many times we have found ourselves wanting to ‘test’ entering transactions, running reports and adding new accounts without using our ‘real’ data but not implementing it on our live Sage 200 company.
This is where a Test Company comes into play!
What you need to know…
This is essentially a company where we are able to test, play, amend and delete data that we have entered into Sage.
Whether you are:
- Questioning the end result from a transaction
- Unsure of the result from changing a setting
- Carrying out training with new employees
- Experimenting with a new process
- Trying to improve on your Sage knowledge
A test company is a great resource that enables you to cover all of these and more.
Setting up a test company is easy. If you don’t already have one, we highly advise that you set one up.
Fortunately, we will be covering that today.
How to set up a Test Company
Prior to setting this up , a few key pieces of information are required.
You will need:
- Access to System Admin
- Access to the SQL Server
- The current live company database name.
Firstly: Head to System Admin > Select Companies from the columns on the left hand side.
From here you will need to make a note of the database name assigned to your current live company.
With this then you need to head to the SQL Server and create a backup of that database.
Once the backup is complete you need to restore this as a new database.
Once this is completed, you will need to create a new company within system admin.
We would suggest that you call the company name the same as your live company, only with test at the end like so:
- Live company name = Small Soldiers LTD
- Test company name = Small Soldiers LTD Test
This ensures the two companies are never selected in error.
You should now open Sage and select the test company from the list of companies, then that is your test company all set up.
Getting the most out of your Test Company
To ensure you are getting the most out of your test company, we suggest you regularly update it.
Similar to the installation of the test company, updating it is simply taking a backup of the live data. The only difference is we are going to restore the backup over the existing test company’s database.
When the process is complete and you have successfully completed your backup and restore, it will be fully up to date.
So, there we have it. I hope you were able to follow all steps easily… Until the next time!
Author – Jade
Website – http://itassolutions.co.uk/benefits-setting-test-company/