August 2013
 In this issue

> How to Protect Against Phishing
> Streamline Your Company's Documents
> To Buy or Not to Buy
> Patch Right and Keep Hackers Out
> Make Your Social Media Activities Rock
> Business Continuity Tip
> Cartoon/Quote

Business Continuity Tip
 When Lightning Strikes

 Summer is the peak season for one of the nation's deadliest weather phenomena € lightning. In the United States, an average of 53 people are killed each year by lightning, and hundreds more are severely injured. Agility has assembled the following resources to help prepare both your employees and your business.

Lightning Safety € Educate employees, friends and family on the dangers associated with strong thunderstorms and lightning. 

Lightning Protection System € Install a lightning protection system (otherwise known as a €lightning rod€) to protecting your building and other assets.

Surge Protectors € To protect your electrical equipment, UL-listed surge arrestors should be installed on the main electrical service panel, as well as incoming phone, cable, satellite and data lines.

Please forward this newsletter to anyone else in your organization who might be interested!

How to Protect Against Phishing
 used with permission from Norton by Symantec

Phishing is an online con game, and phishers are nothing more than tech-savvy con artists. In a typical phishing scam, phishers send out emails, which appear to come from a legitimate company, in an attempt to scam users into providing private information that will be used for identity theft.

Phishers use a variety of sophisticated devices to steal information€including pop-up windows, URL masks which simulate real Web addresses, and keystroke loggers that capture account names and passwords.

To protect yourself against phishing, follow these basic guidelines:

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Streamline Your Company's Documents with
Word's Quick Style Sets

You may already know how to modify and create individual Quick Styles in Microsoft Word. This time, you€ll learn how to go one step further by creating and switching between sets of Quick Styles. 

You can make every company document look the same by reusing your own Quick Style Set!

What is a Quick Style Set?

When you open up Word, a default Quick Style Set already appears and is applied to the document.

Read more
To Buy or Not to Buy
 used with permission from HP Technology at Work

With new technology being released on what seems like a daily basis, it€s understandable that businesses have a hard time keeping up. The next new this and the next new that might seem like a great addition to your business, but how do you know when to immediately embrace new technology or when to wait for the next release?

Often there€s no clear-cut answer. For consumers, adopting a new technology is usually a low-risk behavior. If they buy something they don€t like, they€ll simply replace it with something different during their next purchase. It€s a lot trickier for businesses, though. Rarely do they buy just one product at a time, so their purchases need to benefit the employees and the company as a whole.

Does it make sense to be an early adopter? Here are five questions to ask:

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Patch Right and Keep Hackers Out
 used with permission from HP Technology at Work

In the arms race between network administrators and hackers, battles are fought over the security holes in enterprise software. Your best defence is the patches that vendors release to plug those holes.

Vendors are working to make patching easier and more trustworthy - like Microsoft and its monthly Patch Tuesday release - but you shouldn't necessarily deploy every patch to every system in your enterprise the day it's released. To best protect your network, you should develop a plan for patching that is based on best practices and tailored to your unique enterprise.

Read more
10 Ways to Make Your Small Business Social Media Activities Rock
 used with permission from SBA.gov
by Caron Beesley

Social media may have the lowest cost of entry of any marketing tool, but is not actually that easy to do well. In fact, a report by eMarketer found that small businesses are struggling to adopt social media, with only 24 percent of small firms having integrated social media in a structured way into their operations.

Knowing where to start is perhaps the number one obstacle holding many small business owners back. Knowing what to do when you get there is next.

Read more
 



 

Quote of the Month

"The first principle is that you must not fool yourself, and you are the easiest person to fool."

- Richard Feynman

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 132 North Union Street, Suite 108    |     Olean, New York 14760
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