Organizations who have not partnered well and adopted a modern IT approach, have suffered. This might sound a little self-serving coming from an IT service company, but it’s true. It’s also why I sold Quartet and it’s critical to the future of your organization.

A unit of IT functionality is cheaper now than ever and that’s driving digital transformation. Digital transformation is all about IT shaking up an industry and changing how businesses operate. Products unbundle, supply chains disintermediate, prices surge or collapse, security threats morph, customer and competitors change, and regulators ask for more. The list goes on and on.

Internal IT resources are overwhelmed as their responsibilities creep into other corporate functions. It’s tough for IT to keep up, even with good IT service partnerships. It’s also changing the nature of those partnerships. We’re asked by you to do more things than ever, and a lot of it is non-technical. Business transformation may be driven by technology, but the challenges extend far beyond IT. Organization design, change management, training, pricing, product design and competitive intelligence are examples.

Our development costs for these new services are spread over multiple clients. We leverage this investment efficiency to generate economies of skill and scale faster and cheaper than any one client can. We’ve been doing this for years and its core to our value proposition.

But this time it’s different. The large number of new services, the required investment size, and the fact that many services are outside our comfort zone spooked us. Our clients need more than what we have now, and they don’t have time for us to develop it.

So, we searched for partners with the required scale, skills, and investment appetite, but we also wanted to make a difference to them. We wanted a good home for our clients and our staff. Comprehensive stewardship for the entire Quartet community was our goal. We found that and more in Fully Managed.

At Fully Managed we’re developing the “next generation” digital platform to lead our customers through their unique digital transformation journeys. At the core of this effort is a multi-tenant deployment of the Service Now workflow automation tool suite. Service Now tools extend beyond traditional IT to help manage comprehensive organizational change. In addition, Fully Managed has 400+ staff, offices throughout Canada, visionary leadership, a fun and disciplined culture, and a strong balance sheet. We’ve found a good home for our staff, and for you.

I’m excited by what we’re doing at Fully Managed and expect you will be too as we roll out our new capabilities. Digital transformation is an intimidating imperative for most organizations, and we’ll bring it to you closer and faster than we ever thought possible with Fully Managed.

As the Quartet journey closes, an even more exciting one starts with Fully Managed. I can hardly wait for what’s next.

Stay tuned. More to come.

Rob

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This is a thank you letter to the people who built Quartet.  I purchased Quartet as a tattered real estate/technology experiment, and morphed it into managed services, VoIP, multi-cloud services, cybersecurity, and more. I inherited a broken vision, skeptical staff, and nervous customers, but I also got a great head start on a compelling idea.

I wanted to eliminate that thin membrane between our personal and business lives. I wanted to embrace work friendships and didn’t want to park my life while at work. But calling it a lifestyle vision belittled our intent. We planned build a profitable, professional organization, but not at the expense of all a company could and should be.

Our first step was to build a good home for good people. That’s not revisionist history, it really was our very first goal. We wanted children, spouses, holidays, and parties to be part of the journey, not baggage on it. We surrounded ourselves with people who celebrated nerdship, worked hard, and most of all, cared about each other.

The next step was to find and keep good customers. We learned quickly that our best customers had similar visions. They had warm cultures, played the long game, and were disciplined. We followed simple rules to nurture them:

1. Always give the benefit of the doubt.
2. Fall on your sword if you make a mistake.
3. Seek first to understand.

Our customers were part of our circle and we embraced them every way we could. We are deeply indebted to them.

We’re also indebted to our competitors and suppliers. We thrived on the co-opetition and appreciated the advice, support, empathy, and more. Some of my best friends and best memories come from this group and I’m still smiling about the things we got up to.

Our family and friends were great. They waited patiently as we resolved issues, nodded attentively as we vented, and laughed hard at jokes they didn’t always understand. It’s great to see how our families have evolved and we’re proud of the contributions we’ve made to each other.

However, perhaps the biggest thanks should go to Fully Managed for acquiring Quartet. They share our values, have a dynamite vision and bring the tools, scale, and perspectives needed by our customers and staff as we all move further into the decade of digital transformation. We’re on the very first steps of our journey with them and I couldn’t be more excited about what’s next.

And that’s the story for my next letter.

Stay tuned.

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First of all, I’d like to congratulate Quartet’s staff for winning  this wonderful award.  They’re a hard working, mostly happy bunch of people with a shared interest. We want to build the best company we can for ourselves, our families and our customers. In that order.

It’s a little like those diagrams in an airplane reminding you to put your own mask on before you put your child’s  mask on. We can’t take care of our clients if we don’t take care of ourselves first. Maybe a little counterintuitive, but that’s the way we approach things.

I’d also like to congratulate all the other award winners. We’ve seen many of you through the years and have gotten to know a couple of you. We all seem to have our own pathways to excellence and I’ve really enjoyed hearing about yours.

So, I guess we were already pretty good companies, yet we’ve all kept at it. What’s up with that?

Maybe we’re like Eric Clapton who left the Yardbirds for a year to improve his guitar playing. He was already a star, but he took the time to rebuild really ‘Fast Hands’.

Or maybe, even more delusionally, we’re like Tiger Woods who rebuilt his golf swing after he’d already won several majors.

Perhaps we’re all following that vaguely related Canadian axiom  that ‘You can’t steer a canoe until it’s moving’. Movement is key and we all know it.

The Japanese even have a catchy word for it ….’Kaizen’ or continuous improvement. The Japanese also have another saying,…..that you’ve  probably heard before……… – ‘chiri mo tsumori ba, Yama tow naru ’. …..Even if you gather enough dust eventually it becomes a mountain. Be patient. Keep working.

So, let me push all these metaphors way too far.  Here are Quartet’s excellence axioms:

Excellence isn’t a destination. Excellence is a journey.

Enjoy the ride. Be well and Have fun.

*The Canadian Business Excellence Awards for Private Businesses presented by Excellence Canada is a national award administered annually. This special designation recognizes businesses from all industries that demonstrate a strategic approach to successfully improving performance and achieving goals.

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You dealt with the pandemic’s initial disorienting whirlwind. You re-invented your company’s ability to work from anywhere. You got devices to everyone, trained them up on the new tools and processes. Somehow you kept the network from falling over.

With the vaccine being rolled out, the light at the end of the tunnel is coming into view and it seems like now might be a good time to take a break. But before you do, make sure your work-from-home staff and their devices are really protected from cyberattack.

The new work-from-home situation is different from normal work-from-home

If your employees are working from home, chances are they are not the only ones working from home in their house. And if they have kids, chances are good they are also at home, attending school virtually at least some of the time as outbreaks cause schools to open and close.

This has led to 5 new unavoidable realities.

People are distracted

There are more people in the home vying for their attention. They might not have space for a dedicated distraction-free office. The familiar distractions of home surround them, and they have to do things they used to rely on others to do for them. In the office they could call IT to fix the printer while they grabbed a sandwich from the food court and got back to work. Now they have to fix their own printer and make their own sandwich. It adds up. All of this leads to a more fractured attention span which can lead your employees to overlook what would have been obvious red flags if their full attention was on their work. A phishing email gets clicked on. A fraudulent wire transfer gets approved.

Your team is physically disconnected

Remote workers can’t pop their heads into your office to confirm something in person and you can’t drop by their office to confirm that things are OK. If I’m in the office and get an email from my co-worker saying she’s stuck somewhere and needs me to transfer $1000 to her, I can glance over at her desk and notice that she’s in fact sitting right there. In a virtual office I don’t have that feedback. I need a more formal process to make sure the payment request is legitimate.

Everyone is dealing with a higher volume of electronic communication

Again, distraction.

Home systems and devices

Some of your staff are using home systems including their own tablets and routers which might have vulnerabilities. Have you really done a security audit on all devices? You need another approach.

Limiting access to people in the office doesn’t work anymore

Strategies like IP-based permissions no longer work because each household has a different IP address, and more than likely it changes unpredictably. Pre-pandemic we disallowed anyone from outside our office’s IP range from even reaching the log-in page of our website. These days, that’s not feasible. We have to whitelist the IP address of every employee who needs access, and because their home IP addresses change periodically this creates more work for our support team. It would be tempting to turn off this protection or to whitelist blocks of IP addresses to lessen the number of requests. It could also be dangerous.

Here are three simple things you can do to protect yourself

1. Phishing education

Education and continuous security awareness training can improve your team’s ability to identify and avoid attacks. In fact, one of our phishing education partners has found that proper continuous training can reduce the likelihood of staff clicking on a phishing email by over 87%.

If you know what to look for, you can relegate a lot of these emails to the spam folder with one glance. For example, a lot of attacks are filled with typos. Some people think this is deliberate sloppiness that’s meant to filter out anybody who’s paying too much attention and is unlikely to fall for the next step of the scam. But the typos are often the scammer’s way of getting around spam filters. So instead of bitcoin they might type bizcoin or use domain names that look similar to the legitimate ones. Continuous training goes a long way to protecting your workers and your business.

2. Multi-factor Authentication isn’t for machines anymore

Turn multi-factor authentication (MFA) on. This means attackers would have to compromise more than one device or password to get control. If you’ve ever turned on two factor authentication on Google you know how this works. You enter your password into the login screen and instead of logging you into your account, they ask you for a second proof that you’re who you say you are. They will, for example, text a code to your phone. By entering that code into the login screen, you show that you know your password and you have control of your phone. Someone who only has your password, or only has your phone, won’t be able to get in. Also, if someone who has guessed your password tries to get into your account, you’ll get the login code texted to you, which can tip you off that there’s a problem.

You can use the same principle in your own office. If you get an email from a co-worker asking you to wire them some money, call them on the phone to confirm the request. If they leave you a voice message, confirm with a phone call. Basically, just double check with a live phone call where you can hear their voice and confirm their request.

Just like MFA it doesn’t eliminate the risk, but it reduces it.

3. Talk to someone who sees a lot more attacks than you do

You see what happens to your network. We see what happens to the networks of all our clients. We can share ideas about what’s happening, what works, and what doesn’t. Give our president Rob a call and he can tell you what we’ve seen at companies like yours.

Give us a call at 416-483-8332 or email us here talktous@quartetservice.com.
Then take a break – you deserve it.

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We’ve been working with ECOH for six years now. Here are the highlights of a conversation I had with their CEO recently about where they came from in IT and where they are going now. Its’ been an exciting journey for both of us. At one point John says “IT is now the hub of everything”. Funny how things develop.

ECOH is now one of Canada’s leading environmental consulting firms and we’re proud to have played a part in their growth.

I’m available any time to discuss.

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Is cultural alignment a key to relationship evolution? We think so.

Call me for free pontification.

The post Partnership & Company Culture appeared first on Quartet Service.

One of our clients gave us the gift of bringing an issue we had in our organization to our attention. We had a severe cultural misalignment with one of our staff, and our client’s Director of IT, Tony Aramouni, was kind enough to bring it me. This can be a difficult thing to do.

Turns out, what Tony saw was a symptom of a larger problem. When Tony brought it to me, we were able to see it and address the issue. We became a better organization because of it. Tony’s complaint was a gift.

We learn from our clients’ complaints, and complaints are not easy for anyone. Usually if someone has a complaint, they will just stop using our service. But Tony is like us; he knows the importance of developing a strong relationship with similar companies. We’re glad Tony showed us where we were falling short so we could work to become better.

Here’s a short conversation I recently had with Tony about the work we’ve done with his team at TICO.

The post When a Complaint is a Gift appeared first on Quartet Service.

If you’d like more information about the details of the various levels of SOC (System and Organization Controls), and what benefits having a SOC 2 Type 2 certified IT managed services provider can bring to your business, please get in touch with us and we’ll take you through the details of SOC and its benefits to your business.

The post Quartet Service Celebrates 3 Years of SOC 2 Compliance appeared first on Quartet Service.

Most people are aware of terms like phishing and malware, but do you know those are a part of a larger scheme called social engineering? This is not a new kind of fraud, in fact it’s been used for many years to manipulate a wide range of people into giving up important data about themselves or workplace. A prime example of social engineering goes back to Greek mythology with the Trojan horse. They infiltrated the city of Troy with a “peace offering” filled with soldiers, thus winning the war. With technology at the forefront of our lives, social engineering has entered a new era. Physical human interaction is not necessarily required anymore. These criminals can gain information through emails, pop-ups and public Wi-Fi networks, to name a few. The main objective is to influence, manipulate or trick users into giving up privileged information or access within an organization. They are doing this right under your nose, and if you’re not paying attention you will be a victim of this as well.

External Threats

With technology at the forefront of most businesses, external threats are becoming the benchmark for social engineers. They can hack into core business processes by manipulating people through technological means. There are so many ways for social engineers to trick people, that it is best to ensure you are well versed in some of the ways they can hack your system.

Baiting

First of all, baiting can be done both in person and online. Physical baiting would be a hacker leaving a thumb drive somewhere at a business, then an employee picks it up and plugs it into a computer. Could be curiosity, or simply thinking a co-worker left something behind. However, as soon as the thumb drive gets plugged in, it will infect your computer with malware. The online version of this could be an enticing ad, something to pique interest. Things like “Congrats, you’ve won!” Also, there is scareware, in which users are deceived to think their system is infected with malware, saying things like “Your computer has been infected, click here to start virus protection.” By clicking on it, you unintentionally downloaded malware to your computer. If you understand what you are looking for, you can usually avoid these situations.

Phishing

This is probably one of the most popular social engineering attacks. Fairly generalized, this usually comes in the form of an email. Often, they ask the user to change their email, or login to check on a policy violation. Usually the email will look official and even take you to a site that looks almost identical to the one you may be used to. After that, any information you type in will we transmitted to the hacker. You just fell for the oldest online hack in the book.

Spear Phishing

Similar to generic phishing, spear phishing is a more targeted scam. This does take a little more time and research for hackers to pull off, but when they do it’s hard to tell the difference. They often tailor their messages based on characteristics, job positions, and contacts belonging to their victims to make their attack less conspicuous. This could be in the form of an email, acting as the IT guy with the same signature and even cc’s to co-workers. It looks legitimate but as soon as you click the link, you are allowing malware to flood your computer.

Internal Threats

Originally, social engineering took place in a physical setting. A hacker would do some preliminary research on a company structure or focus on behaviors in order to get that initial access into a building, server room or IT space. Once they have a “foot in the door” so to speak, obtaining pertinent data or planting malware becomes that much easier.

Tailgating

Often, they will enter a building without an access pass by simply acting like an employee that left it at home, this technique is known as tailgating. The only credential they need is confidence. This can also include a hacker posing as an IT person and conning people into believing that to be true so they can gain access to high-security areas. This is far easier than it sounds too. You can find company shirts at your local thrift store, exude confidence and gain access.

Psychology

Another interesting process hackers use to con their way into a business is by creating a hostile situation. According to PC World, people avoid those that appear to be mad, upset or angry. So, a hacker can have a fake heated phone call and reduce the likelihood of being stopped or questioned. Human psychology really is a tricky thing, isn’t it?

Public Information

Then of course, the more you know about someone the more likely you are going to gain the information you need from them. This involves everything from scoping out parking lots, observing the workspace and even dumpster diving. Nothing is safe anymore and your life is not always as secure as you’d like to think. Something as innocent as a bill can be used to harvest more information about a person.

Pretexting

Similar to online phishing, pretexting is a popular fraud tactic for phone calls. Often, they will disguise themselves as an authority such as a bank, tax official or even police. They will probe you with questions that could lead to giving up information that could compromise your identity. This personal information can be used to find out a whole slew of things. Not only can they get away with your money immediately, they can easily steal your identity with pertinent information like social security numbers or banking information.

External Threats

Social engineering can be prevented by being educated in it. With so many different ways to steal your important data its imperative that individuals and businesses go through some sort of training regarding these issues. However, on a day to day basis, getting into certain habits can help. First of all, pay attention to your surroundings. Remember that physical social engineering still exists and you don’t want to be the one that caused your business corrupted data. Next, do not open emails or attachments from suspicious sources. Moreover, if a legitimate looking email seems slightly suspicious, go to the source and find out for sure if they sent it. Also, multi-factor authentication can curb fraud immensely. One of the most valuable pieces of information attackers seek are user credentials. Using multifactor authentication helps ensure your account’s protection in the event of system compromise. Furthermore, if an offer seems too good to be true, it probably is. Don’t click the link, you didn’t win a cruise. Then finally, keep your antivirus and/or antimalware software updated at all times. This is the best line of defense if for some reason your system has been compromised. For the most part, use your best judgment and common sense. Social engineers have gotten very good at their jobs, but that’s okay because you’ve gotten very good at yours too and can combat these sneaky hackers.

Need help strengthening your security defenses? Give us a call at (416) 483-8332.

The post Social Engineering = Fancy Job Title for Hackers appeared first on Quartet Service.

You’re prepared, at least mentally, to begin your migration to Windows 10 because you’ve read What Does Windows End of Life Mean to My Business? and Getting Ahead of Windows End of Life. Is your hardware ready, though? How you handle your IT (on your own, as needed support, or with a fully managed agreement) will change how you will have to deal with your transition. The following items should help you decide how to prepare your hardware for the Windows 10 migration.

Do It Yourself

If you own all of your own equipment and deal with IT issues in house, then you will want to get started on migrating your devices now. The good news is that Windows 10 is highly compatible with just about every PC out there. If you run into trouble, it’s likely a vendor incompatibility issue, not Microsoft, itself, so you’ll want to contact them directly. When you have that handled, upgrading from 7 to 10 is as simple as running the ISO file from Microsoft.com, from a USB, or DVD. The bad news is that it will take significant time migrating every PC in your business. You’ll also need to deal with a backlog of Microsoft customer service support if you happen to run into any issues. Remember that almost 70% of the world’s computers are still running Windows 7. It’s almost guaranteed that others will run into issues and need support, as well.

MSP

If you are with a managed service provider, you should be just fine. In fact, you may have already contacted your provider to plan your migration. Over the course of the next few months, your IT company will ensure software compatibility with all of your line of business applications and contact any necessary vendors. They will schedule a time with you to come out and run the update once they’re sure everything will go smoothly. Now, would also be a good time to consider any hardware upgrades that you’ve been needing. All new PCs will automatically come with Windows 10 which would alleviate any upgrade issues now or in the next three years. Either way, the best part is you have a partner managing the upgrade (or new hardware installation) and they’ve been migrating customers like you for months, giving them the ability to avoid the common pitfalls.

Time to Get a Contract?

If you’re reading this blog as someone that had planned to do this upgrade on your own but have now decided that you don’t have the time or desire to do so? It’s time to contact Quartet Service. We’ll make sure that you’re taken care of through Windows 7 end of life and well beyond.

Call us at 416-483-8332 for more information!

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