Your Monthly Biz Tech Roundup from Seeto
Welcome to the second edition of Seeto’s monthly newsletter, take Ctrl. Like many sequels, there’s always the fear that it won’t live up to the original. Never fear, the Seeto team has dug deep to round up the biz tech news you need to know this month.
It has been a busy month for Apple, with major updates arriving to macOS and iPad OS. Expect more on all the great, new macOS Ventura features and our hands-on thoughts next month. This also means now is the time to update any Macs still running macOS Catalina and all your iPads.
This month, the Seeto Team has been thinking a lot about the future of work and how the Seeto Stack, our Seeto-approved selection of productivity tools and biz tech services, supports hybrid organisations to work efficiently from anywhere.
As Cyber Security Awareness Month draws to a close, this month’s Seeto Take looks at what your organisation can do year-round to reduce your exposure to cyber risk.
Need To Know
Image courtesy of Slack
Updates to Slack Huddles
Slack introduced a new way to work with your colleagues remotely and collaborate more easily with the release of Huddles early this year. Since its release, in the last month Huddles has received a significant update with improvements to screen sharing and the addition of video meetings.
New Google Workspace innovations to help organisations thrive in hybrid work
Google has released a number of new products and features to make it easier for hybrid workers to connect, create, and collaborate from anywhere.
Productivity KPIs need a 21st-century makeover
Businesses need to reassess the metrics they apply to determine how productive employees are in the world of hybrid work – or risk staff leaving for a corporate culture that is more flexible and trusting.
Intune Support for Linux Platform Started Rolling out Silently
Good news for Intune users, on the week of October 10th, Microsoft announced that Linux device management is now generally available for Microsoft Intune.
Read more at Redmond Mag or find out more about what’s available for Linux device management at Microsoft Learn
Product Showcase
Do you keep your employee records in spreadsheets? A lot of businesses we talk to start out by doing this, but as your business scales, keeping track of employee details and other day-to-day HR information will get messier and harder to manage over time and may even become a compliance headache. There is a better way to handle your employee data and that’s BambooHR, an all-in-one HR software made for small and medium businesses. BambooHR makes it easy to collect, maintain, and analyse your people data, improve the way you hire talent, onboard new employees, manage compensation, and develop your company culture. It’s designed to set you free to focus on what matters most—your people. This is Seeto’s tried, tested and recommended HR software. Check out BambooHR and why it’s so good here, speak to your dedicated TOM or TSE, or use the contact form.
The Seeto Take
Security is a risky business
Cyber Security Awareness Month is over for another year. Perhaps you reviewed your information security policy, spoke to the team about keeping safe online, or double-checked that multi-factor authentication is switched on for your team. These are all great steps and all contribute to a better-protected workplace, but November isn’t the time to put aside your worries and close the book on security.
Securing your business is a year-round commitment. Effective security requires good processes and a holistic approach. Effective security doesn’t depend on any specific technology, but technology can help at any stage of the information security lifecycle.
Best practices evolve over time and security standards are currently in a state of flux. The National Cyber Security Centre continues to make good on its 2020 promise to review the Cyber Essentials standard more regularly, with a significant update having arrived in January of this year and further incremental updates expected in early 2023. Overall, this is good news for businesses as certifying against Cyber Essentials is a motivating factor for businesses to implement the controls that represent the minimum level of security a business should strive for.
Looking further afield, the International Standards Organisation issued an updated reference set of information security controls at the beginning of the year and, as of the last week in October, the international standard for information security management systems has had its first revision in nearly ten years. The US National Institute of Standards and Technology has also embarked on a significant update of their Cyber Security Framework, popular with US businesses and the organisations who work closely with them, to better reflect today’s cyber security landscape; their update is expected to arrive in 2023.
With the security landscape changing, we need to take practical steps to evolve our approaches to information security management. The World Economic Forum’s Global Cybersecurity Outlook report indicates that cyber-attacks increased 125 % globally in 2021, with evidence suggesting a continued uptick through 2022. In this fast-changing landscape, leaders must take a strategic approach to cyber risks. Even in changing times, the core of information security management will always remain the identification and management of risk.
In practice, how do we identify information security risk? There are numerous frameworks and standards designed to support risk management, but making a national or international standard or a consulting firm, bank or other think tank’s processes work for your business can often take rounds of trial and error, costing both time and wasted effort.
Rather than adopting new methodologies, businesses with an established process for assessing and managing financial or operational risk would be wise to stick with what they know and adapt their existing approach to cyber and information security risks. But, is it possible to do that without an in-depth knowledge and understanding of information security?
Absolutely, all you need is the OCTAVE Allegro framework. The joy of the Allegro framework is that it was developed to require only limited risk management and information technology knowledge to be able to assess cyber risk and to produce consistent and comparable results – essential for any risk management exercise. Allegro democratises participation in the assessment process.
The Allegro framework was developed by the CERT® Survivable Enterprise Management team at Carnegie Mellon University’s Software Engineering Institute.
If you are interested in assessing your business’s cyber security risks but are not sure where to start, Seeto can help. Existing Concierge customers should speak to their dedicated Technology Operations Manager or Technology Support Engineer. If you would like to explore how Seeto Advisory can support your business, reach out to the friendly Seeto team using the contact form.
Recent OS Updates
Last updated 3 July 2024
Windows
Microsoft currently supports Windows 10 and Windows 11.
- Windows 10 version 22H2 (10.0.19045)
- Windows 11 version 22H2 (10.0.22621) and version 23H2 (10.0.22631)
macOS
Apple officially supports the following Mac operating systems:
- macOS Sonoma 14.5
- macOS Ventura 13.6.7
- macOS Monterey 12.7.5
iOS and iPadOS
The supported iPhone and iPad operating systems are:
- iOS 17.5.1
- iPadOS 17.5.1
Android
Google supports the following Android operating systems:
- Android 14
- Android 13
- Android 12
Note that your device manufacturer may not support every version that Google produces security fixes for.
Learn how to check and update your Android version here.
