"BiziNet Media" BiziNet™ Articles

While it's good to be optimistic about the future, the reality is that the business environment won't go back to the way it was in early 2020. The impact of the COVID-19 pandemic and subsequent restrictions have permanently changed attitudes and behaviours - and what expectations are realistic for many businesses in 2021 and beyond. Here we offer a few ideas to help companies make it through challenging times.

We have a big problem in Australia. We learnt to use words like "innovation" and "digital" well. A bit too well. By the term "use", I mean senselessly throw around to be trendy amongst our peers in business. Every man and his dog is a digital expert at the forefront of digital innovation nowadays. Government is entirely on the bandwagon, flooding the market with guides, seminars and workshops as to how to digitise your business when they should be instead focused on getting their own digital affairs in order (e.g. the "COVIDSafe" Coronavirus App & the March 2020 MyGov/Centrelink failure).

Four-legged, two-legged, no-legged companion creatures, great and small, John Grima loves them all. Born in the rural outskirts of Sydney, John's passion for any animal or fish was obvious from the beginning. It's no surprise that from that early love, John now owns and runs one of the largest pet store operations in Australia - a superstore that offers support to all pet owners at every stage of their pet's life cycle.

In Part I, I went over some of the key security issues that business operators can be caught out with. These included issues such as Online Identity Theft, "Phishing" and Passwords. In this Part II article, the discussion on the topic continues with more IT security principles that cover protection of your domain names, cryptocurrency blackmail scams, viruses and some other general ways as to how to fortify your business against breaches.

IT Security is a controversial topic. Just like backing up your data, it is something a lot of (often new) business operators do not consider or take into account until they are faced with a serious situation that results in a complete shutdown of operations and there is no choice but to deal with the circumstances. Modern IT systems tend to be quite a bit more sophisticated and resilient as compared to what was offered in the past in terms of both software and hardware - e.g. there is less of a risk of your Operating System being a major security risk. Nowadays, it's usually the fault of the end user that causes the system to be compromised.