An increasing number of small to medium sized enterprises have been choosing to employ managed IT services in Sydney since it is a cost effective and worry free option.

More and more bigger corporations are exercising good judgment and choosing managed IT services for their Sydney businesses so that their in-house IT workforce can focus on more productive company pursuits. The technological world advances so quickly that there are a multitude of updates, tweaks, and security issues to look out for every week.

Here’s a glimpse of what recent issues your managed IT services team has to consider and attend to:

36 Patches for Adobe Flash

Adobe just sent out a surprising large number of security patches this week. As you and your managed IT services team in Sydney may know, vulnerabilities in flash player plug-in exposes computers to a large number of dangers from spying and hacking. One of the 36 patches included the hypercritical zero-day susceptibility which hackers can use to take full control of the affective machine and cause it to crash. The said vulnerability affects the newest version of flash across Chrome, Linux, Mac, and Windows platforms. Kapersky, a renowned security firm, believes that hackers have already been using zero-day in many countries.

Your managed IT services team in Sydney will surely be busy this week with patch updates on all your business computers that use Adobe Flash to ensure that hackers will not be able to control your business systems and networks. It might also be a good idea to discuss with IT managed services team in Sydney if installing a plug-in that could control if you would allow or disallow flash content to be viewed would be productive or counterproductive for your line of business.

Goodbye To ATO e-tax

The Tax Office said goodbye to its 17 year legacy online tax lodgment tool – e-tax and it has now been replaced with myTax platform. MyTax was launched in 2014 but it could only be used by people who had less complicated tax affairs. In the past year, ATO has expanded the use of myTax and it has been used for lump sum payments, superannuation pensions, foreign pensions, managed funds, and additional tax deductions. Starting July 1, 2016, myTax would be capable of every that e-tax was able to do. One of the many features that were added was the capability for Australians with rental properties to be able to use convenient tools like capital gains and depreciation calculators. Although it has been a couple of years since myGov website for lodging taxes has encountered any issues, it would still be best to check with your managed IT services teams in Sydney on when they do routine checks for malware before you log on to the tax site. There were many individuals and businesses who were victimised by malware in spam emails that spoofed the Australian Tax Office.

Decline in Cost of Australian Data Breaches

Business owners and their managed IT services teams in Sydney and the whole of Australia would be glad to hear the findings of the 2016 Cost of Data Breach study done by the Ponemon Institute (sponsored by IBM). It says that the cost per breach and compromised record to Australian organisations has decreased. For the very first time, the cost of $2.82 million in 2015 has dropped to $2.64 million for the current year. An alarming number of Australian SMEs were targeted by cyber criminals in the past two years and this prompted business owners to seek help and assurance from dependable managed IT services teams, especially in Sydney. The research also showed that local companies were good in retaining clients even if their systems were breached despite costs relating to diminished goodwill and reputational damage.

Valiant efforts of dependable managed IT services teams in Sydney and IT groups across the nation in using extensive encryption, training employees, CISO appointments, quick incident response, threat sharing, and managing business continuity helped in the decrease of the overall cost of the breaches. Costs of escalation, detection, investigations, forensics, crisis management, and audits also went down slightly from $1.15 million in 2015 to $1.10 million this year. The expenditure in activities that followed breaches like identity protection, help desks, notifying affected clients and legal costs also decreased.