Categories
Security

Security is Everyone’s Business

You’ve probably seen movies in which a spy moves silently through the dead of night, slipping through security cameras and laser beams to slide a USB flash drive into a computer in the center of a fortress. It’d be so much easier for companies to protect their data and customers if all they needed to do was invest in defending one computer from some caper, but IT security is far more often a semi-clever attack targeting your employees or partners through social espionage or cyberattacks.

The best encryption and a brilliant security team are extremely valuable to any company. However, developing training and protocols to empower EVERYONE who works at your company is mandatory to manage the very real security risks.

Everyone, really?

Yes, everyone is needed to protect data. Security breaches can often seem like no big deal until it’s too late. The angry, urgent call demanding that an administrative assistant provide the information on a printer is all that’s needed to get into a network without notice. Given enough time, the hacker can use the point of entry from the printer to work deeper into the network. Or someone coming into work might find a USB drive in the parking lot, put it in their computer to see if they can return it to the rightful owner, and end up infecting the whole network with a virus. If a company is interested in protecting its data, it’ll empower all its employees to protect the company.

Okay, fine—but how?

We’re so glad you asked. There are several things a company can do to empower its staff. Here are our top ten tips:

  1. Communicate with your staff about their responsibilities, accountability, and authority in their position. Empower all employees to act like owners over their space, data, and jobs.
  2. Provide organizational data to your staff. It’s important, especially in larger companies, that staff can see who works at their organization and who their bosses are. That way, staff members can verify requests and questions before giving out information.
  3. Trust your gut. Tell staff that if something seems weird, they should report it immediately. Situations that arise where an employee feels unnecessarily pressured or has someone new asking for something unusual can be flags indicating that someone is trying to get information they shouldn’t have. Encourage employees to trust their judgment.
  4. Create security protocols, share them with staff, and publish them somewhere accessible to everyone at your company. These protocols should have clear paths for each staff member to stop a possible attack and escalate the issue. In tech departments, this can be a challenge. No one ever wants the network to go down but trusting a tech to pause service and escalate to the security team is much better than losing banking or personal information.
  5. Train and test your staff. Provide information on ways they can take ownership in protecting the company. Have your security team run white hat challenges to see if retraining is needed to empower all employees to protect company data.
  6. If possible, provide corporate devices for employee work. A separate work phone keeps the network more secure and not subject to the emails and applications staff put on their personal devices.
  7. Teach and practice good technology management by keeping browsers updated and patching networks for known issues.
  8. Have a security team on hand or work with a security firm to assess and troubleshoot your current network setup.
  9. Encourage staff to be thoughtful about the email attachments they open or the links they follow from email.
  10. Practice like a breach is inevitable. This is one area where defense is the best offense. 


There isn’t much a company can do to prevent attacks, but there is a lot a company can do to empower its most valuable resource—its people. When we work as a team to secure the company, we can stop attacks or respond faster with better outcomes.

Categories
Environment

Leading the Charge in Environmentally Friendly Data

In the early 1980s, businesses were hopeful that office computers would decrease our dependence on paper. However, the quick processing time and the concerns regarding long-term data storage led to backing up more data on paper. By the 1990s, it was obvious that computing had improved a lot of things, but conserving paper wasn’t one of them. This situation reaffirmed an old truth about all innovations: despite our hopes for idealistic outcomes, every new idea comes with benefits and consequences.

That’s why we not only look for innovative approaches to environmental sustainability, we also test and refine our efforts to identify and minimize undesired consequences. Then, we take additional steps to make sure that these approaches are sustainable at scale for our users.

Here are some of our current approaches to providing environmentally sustainable technology.

To the clouds

Cloud computing has clear environmental benefits. Providing data centers that allow our users to share the most powerful servers available takes the financial burden off users and maximizes the usage of the servers. Fewer servers need to be made and less energy is taken up at each business. This increases your office’s computing capacity and allows us to work strategically to power our data centers through the most environmentally sustainable methods

Sustainable partnerships

Our data centers are all designed and built using thoroughly tested technological solutions that reduce waste and limit detrimental emissions. Currently, ten of those data centers are powered entirely by either solar or wind farms through our partnership with KinetEco, Inc. Another ten data centers are targeted to move to sustainable energy sources this year. Building and operating our data centers to be energy efficient has us on track to meet our 2030 environmental sustainability goal.

Power of machine learning

Red30 Tech machine learning and artificial intelligence algorithms are elegant to say the least. We use them to analyze data, storage, and energy usage. So far, these algorithms have helped us change how we consume power and save 5% of our operational budget through implementing the suggestions. Furthermore, in a few of our buildings, we’ve installed smart devices that allow the machine learning and AI processes to act in real time. We should have the results of these studies to share in a white paper coming in Q4.

What’s to come

Right now, we’re doing more research into vendors that are developing recyclable technologies or technologies that don’t rely heavily on mining. This is a challenge, as most technology depends on rare earth elements that aren’t often found in large concentrations, which means extensive mining that impacts the abundance of nature. Today, that means we’re continuing to buy products that involve mining. We’re also continuing to support and perform research and development until we can find the right combination of materials and people to create the technology needed in the future.

We feel privileged to work with and for you to make environmentally sound technology choices. It’s through our business partnerships that we can pool our voices and push for the technology we and our planet deserve.

Categories
Community

Celebrating the Power of Community with Red30 Tech Exercise App

Belief in the power of community is central to how Red30 Tech innovates as a company. Trail2marathon, acquired by Red30 Tech a few years ago, has continued to develop their race training application and expand its focus to include features for the whole community. This iteration of the application is now called Red30 Community and will launch as part of the Red30 Gives Foundation to honor the value of bringing people together to achieve great things.

This year on June 15th, Red30 Community will be available in app stores for any individual to download. The application is launching officially with the 5K fun run in the City of Orange Valley. The beta version of this cloud-based application has been available to members of the City of Orange Valley community since March. The application allows users to track their training, connect with other runners, see other community events, and compile health data from other applications. It also allows for full privacy control at every level to allow each user to customize the app based on their needs.

To find out more about this application, we reached out to one of the registered participants, Sandie Gobnet. “The app is really amazing,” said Gobnet. I downloaded it when I got my race day information and I thought I’d look at it once and delete it. However, it’s really helpful! It connects to three different wellness applications I already have on my phone and my scale at home. Suddenly, I can see a connection between my activities and lifestyle. Also, the application has a really active community section. I have training buddies and a whole group of friends to run with on June 15th. This is everything I could possibly want in a community application—I joined a supportive group within my community and made new friends. How often do you hear someone say that an application helped them find people to hang out with in person?”

Sandie isn’t the only one to report this type of engagement. Already, there are 3,000 users that identify themselves as living in the City of Orange Valley and over 50 user-created communities that are active daily. That number continues to grow.

Red30 Tech engineers will partner with mathematics and ethics grad students at Orange Valley University to develop research questions around the data gleaned from this trial and the five others planned this year.

Sarada Kapoor, Red30 Tech CEO, spoke about this partnership recently at an all-hands meeting. “Red30 Tech has always worked to help businesses grow globally,” said Kapoor. “So, what can be better than supporting every human in creating connections within their community and getting data that helps them live their best life? Since Red30 Community is a community-based application with health components, we’ll strive to be ethical and visionary in how we use data. First and foremost, the only data we’ll use will be shared by participants who opt in and toggle on the data they wish to share. Second, we’re partnering with a college in the community to create partnerships that support the local economy and help us think through the hard questions of technological excellence. I’m so hopeful for this launch and what iterating it can mean for communities across the globe and into the future.”

Good luck to all of you running at the 5K in the City of Orange Valley this June. We can’t wait to join you virtually and in person!