Managing a business in today’s hectic world can be exciting and exhausting. You build your business and become successful only to fall prey to threats in the digital environment. The key is using a secure platform that allows you to manage both your information as well as your activities without fear of them being corrupted or lost while navigating the internet. Virtual Office XDR (and XDR Plus) allows your business to thrive within a SIEM framework that you can count on for maximum security.

The SIEM Framework

SIEM brings together information management and event management in a framework that makes it easy to control both in a secure and protected environment. It’s a security solution that has the ability to identify possible threats that could damage your digital infrastructure. Finding these vulnerable areas and creating security protocols that prevent them from being compromised is the purpose of a security information and event management system.

XDR: What Is It?

Extended Detection and Response, or XDR, uses artificial intelligence and a variety of technologically advanced tools to gather and organize data throughout the different security levels. This makes it possible for the platform to detect, investigate, analyze, and respond to many different security disruptions or threats as quickly and efficiently as possible.

Why Is XDR an Essential Tool?

Businesses normally have many security layers within their system to protect them from hackers and other internet predators. Anti-virus programs, firewalls, and MFAs all work independently but exist within the same environment. Internet predators work to find ways through these layers. If a person were in charge of identifying and eliminating these many threats, they would be overwhelmed and unable to keep up.

With VirtuWorks Virtual Office, the entire cybersecurity process of identifying, investigating, processing, and eliminating threats is performed within the platform, with VirtuWork’s experienced staff providing the vital human component to ensure security. XDR gathers and organizes massive amounts of data from every layer of defense. It identifies threats and eliminates them quickly and efficiently, much faster than any human could accomplish the task.

In addition to XDR services, VirtuWorks also provides onboarding support, U.S.-based remote support 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year, and more.

Who Needs It?

If you are a business owner who relies on a digital platform to efficiently operate your business, then VirtuWorks’ Virtual Office XDR is designed for you. As a cloud environment, you’ll have all the space you need. Regarding SIEM, our experts have all of the necessary instruments to secure and protect every aspect of your digital world. The tools and processes within its framework make it possible to work safely and manage your entire SIEM system efficiently and expeditiously.

Protecting your business should always be your priority. With XDR Microsoft, you will have everything you need to maintain the highest level of security possible. Our team will maximize the features it offers to monitor every aspect of your digital environment. When it comes to keeping your business secure, you need the most potent cybersecurity tools possible. Virtual Office XDR from VirtuWorks gives you that power.

As the scope of business technology continues to broaden with systems and tools to make enterprise management more efficient and profitable, more sophisticated cyber threats are also popping up to compromise the security of businesses.

Unfortunately, viruses, malware, and severe cyber threats still occur even with some of the most up-to-date protection like firewalls, anti-virus capability, and multi-factor authentication. Part of the problem is that each security measure operates independently, which causes source detection and appropriate remedy identification to be complicated, sometimes nearly impossible.

The solution for is comprehensive, customized oversight by Microsoft Sentinel, managed and monitored by a knowledgeable managed service provider with Extended Detection Response (XDR) like VirtuWorks.

Why Microsoft Sentinel?

Microsoft Sentinel is a proactive, scalable attack detection system that hunts, detects, and reveals system threats that may be occurring. A security information and event management system (SIEM), Microsoft Sentinel collects data across your enterprise to identify threats instantly, make them identifiable, and initiate the appropriate response using smart and fast artificial intelligence.

Once implemented and managed, Sentinel augments your existing security infrastructure by analyzing and applying intelligence to the signal and alert data returned by your various security measures.

With skilled human oversight and coordination, the implementation of XDR Microsoft Sentinel will reduce the stress created by increasingly sophisticated and ongoing cyberattacks, constant alerts, and the time spent trying to resolve security problems.

How Does Microsoft Sentinel Work?

Microsoft has applied decades of industry-leading technology experience to create the most advanced system of protection for its software. To this end, Microsoft Sentinel employs a Four-Step Process characterized as Collect, Detect, Investigate, and Respond:

• Collect all data throughout the enterprise network, whether in-house or from multiple Cloud sources.
• By using advanced analytics, the newly installed XDR Microsoft system will detect lingering and current security issues that may be present.
• Building upon Microsoft’s decades of security expertise and capabilities, Sentinel will continually investigate security threats and potentially suspicious activity.
• Respond quickly to incidents with its built-in orchestration.

Implementing and Employing Microsoft Sentinel

During the onboarding process, the VirtuWorks XDR Team creates integrated connectors that detect and ingest the existing security assets, which may include both Microsoft and non-Microsoft products.

When all data sources are connected successfully, overseers will create custom workbooks using Azure Monitor Workbooks to gain specific insight into the status and performance of each data source to monitor performance.

Microsoft Sentinel Analytics allows VirtuWorks to review, investigate, and review incidents or potentially actionable threats created by a series of related alerts. Viewing several seemingly low-threat signals across a broad enterprise can uncover a wide-ranging threat to the entire system.

How Virtuworks’ Virtual Office XDR Makes Microsoft’s Sentinel Effective

Microsoft Sentinel offers the state-of-the-art capability to create an overview of cyber threats that may endanger your system. But while the software is highly effective in identifying and gathering real-time information about the presence of dangerous infiltration, knowledgeable and timely human intervention is still vital.

Virtual Office XDR, managed by VirtuWorks, can be your full-service IT support system with essential software like Microsoft 365, cyber protection, accessibility, scalability, and US-based IT pros to manage it on your behalf. Check out VirtuWorks’ comprehensive Virtual Office XDR service and add-ons to gain the peace of mind that comes from knowing that your information and assets are always protected.

IT innovation forms the core of many businesses, allowing them to better reach customers, communicate, and stay competitive. These benefits, however, are not without cost. Managing complex, burgeoning IT projects can be a burden on staff, finances, and growth, and doing so without the requisite expertise or understanding will only exacerbate these issues.

As a result, hiring an outside party to help plan and execute your IT projects will almost always result in a better outcome. Hiring IT project consulting services can contribute in several key ways that general project managers and in-house IT departments are unable to.

Keeping Projects on Track

In-house IT projects often take longer to execute than initially intended, extended for months or even years due to unforeseen circumstances and costly mistakes. For an IT project consultant, however, those circumstances will be entirely predictable. They will have worked with dozens of clients on projects across a range of configurations and seen almost every roadblock. They can apply the lessons learned from other organizations to yours, producing an accurate and feasible plan that is effectively tracked and reported.

Improving Business Efficiency

IT consultants have the tools and knowledge to effectively assess your business, spot its weak points, and architect a technological solution that fits your infrastructure and workflow. They understand that a good solution that is poorly integrated can end up causing more harm than good. Instead, they will help to streamline your business and IT processes to make employees more productive and less stressed.

Project Consulting Can Provides an Outside Perspective

Internal project managers are an invaluable asset. They’re experts in their specific niche and are intimately familiar with the company’s objectives, employees, and day-to-day processes.

Sometimes, however, these very aspects can become a hindrance. When you are too close to a project it can be difficult to see where the real issues lie. When you do identify a problem, office politics can come into play, with different parties pointing fingers and bringing their own bias to the table.

Conversely, by hiring outside IT project consulting services, those external consultants provide a more objective and distanced look at a situation. They’re as close to neutral ground as you can get, and are therefore a natural antidote to office squabbles and tunnel vision.

Cutting Costs

The biggest barrier to hiring an IT consultant is usually the cost. Only the largest companies have the need for a permanent consulting team. External consultants can be contracted for a defined period without the additional costs of company benefits or the productivity loss of office chit-chat. They get paid only for the hours they work and can be wholly concentrated on the project at hand.

Despite this, they bring the same financial benefits. As well as providing direct savings by spotting redundancies and ensuring projects don’t go over budget, they can indirectly affect profits by:

• Bringing new enthusiasm to struggling projects
• Easing the burden on existing project members, allowing them to be more productive
• Transferring invaluable knowledge to existing IT staff
• Executing your project in a way that’s best suited to your business strategy

Choosing VirtuWorks for Your IT Project Consulting

As an MSP with over 25 years of experience, VirtuWorks has gathered some of the best engineers and IT consultants in the business. When you choose us for IT project consulting, we’ll use a series of meetings and consultations to plan a design that works for your business. You’ll then receive a dedicated project manager who will keep your project running smoothly, as well as track the project’s progress and provide regular reports. Finally, if something goes awry, VirtuWorks’ experienced staff will be available for on-site intervention.

Contact VirtuWorks today to learn more about keeping your project cost-effective, on track, and aligned with your strategic goals.

Computer networks, whether on-prem, cloud, or hybrid, are a core part of almost every modern business. A well-designed network allows employees to be productive and clients to stay happy. Unfortunately, they’re also complex and that complexity tends to increase over time. A simple setup for a couple of founders can easily spiral into a behemoth as the company grows, spiraling across various geographical regions or countries with extensive virtual infrastructure and a wide variety of services, apps, employees, and devices.

What’s more, networks are in a state of constant change. Changes in where and how employees are working, the businesses’ activities in any given month, security threats, and more all have an additive effect on performance and configuration requirements.

Unsurprisingly, many businesses are unable to commit the resources to keep their network running smoothly, despite the huge impact it can have on their bottom line. Even ignoring the cost of financing industry software and a dedicated IT operations team, tangible skills shortages make it difficult to find engineers with the necessary expertise.

As a result, it’s becoming increasingly sensible for organizations to pay a Managed Service Provider (MSP) to take care of their network for them.

The Benefits of an MSP Partnership

MSPs aren’t just investing in networking personnel and software as an aside – it’s at the core of what they do. An MSP will have some of the best network engineers in the business with hundreds of years of combined experience across a wide range of configurations.

Due to their extensive personnel and software investment, MSPs can also offer services that you would be unable to support on your own or would be unable to offer outside of business hours. This typically results in the following benefits:

• Less downtime: An MSP will likely monitor your firewall, routers, printers, switches, and wireless network 24/7 and be ready to respond as soon as an issue arises with remote or on-site support. You don’t have to wait for employees to get into work in the morning and notice the issue – it’ll already be fixed by the time they arrive.
• Improved security: DDoS, ARP poisoning, and other cyberattacks are detectable through network traffic in their early stages. A competent MSP has the capabilities to detect and stop these attacks before they cause damage. Just as vitally, they will ensure that the software and firmware of your network-connected devices are up to date and secure.
• Fewer intermittent issues: Good MSPs excel, not just in preventing extended downtime, but also short-lived downtime and slowdowns. This is because they have the resources to perform proactive maintenance to prevent issues before they develop.
• Predictable billing: The reality of network management is that costs are never stable. The amount a company spends per month can vary dramatically depending on the tasks performed, whether emergency intervention is required, and various other factors. An MSP weathers this instability for the customer by typically charging a flat, fair monthly rate that makes budgeting simple.
• The freedom to be creative: If a business is struggling to stay on top of its current network, it’s less likely to trial new additions and its IT staff have less time to help employees use their tools effectively and creatively. Outsourcing your network to a reputable MSP affords the peace of mind that no matter what you do, experts will have your back.

Partnering with VirtuWorks

With 25 years under its belt designing, implementing, and supporting systems of all sizes, it’s fair to say that networking is VirtuWorks’ forté. Providing Managed IT Services with a team of over 25 highly skilled engineers, security experts, and IT consultants, you can trust that your technology investment is in very capable hands..

Reach out today to learn more about how we can keep your network stable, secure, and cost-effective.

As we hopefully enter the end game of the pandemic, it’s becoming clear that the colossal changes to the way we live and work will be less temporary than many organizations expected. With some staff vying to spend more time at home with their families and others seeing the value of dedicated office space, it’s clear that hybrid work will be the compromise that defines the next decade.

At the core of this future will be solutions that close the gap between office and home. Ones that allow companies to communicate and collaborate securely, whether they’re sitting next to their co-worker or their dog. With its extensive existing infrastructure and several recent improvements, Microsoft 365 is poised to deliver this coming paradigm shift.

Embracing the Metaverse

There has been a lot of important discussions surrounding the metaverse in the social space. In particular, whether giving large social media platforms a direct feed of your eyeballs is a good idea. In the context of hybrid work, however, it has unique potential.

With Microsoft Mesh, which is now available directly in Teams, companies can emulate an office environment without needing the physical space to house all of their employees. Users can project themselves into an immersive virtual space with employees in offices and homes across the globe. There they can hold meetings, collaborate on shared whiteboards, lounge by the water cooler, and chat. Organizations will even be able to recreate their physical office in the virtual world, further minimizing the friction between the real and virtual.

Asynchronous Work

As we move towards a hybrid future we can expect a lesser focus on synchronized communication and work. With the rise of Microsoft 365’s fluid components, employees can stay productive and up to date without the need for in-person status updates or live audio calls. Instead, they’ll blend live and asynchronous work as it suits them and the task.

With the addition of fluid components in Teams, Outlook, Whiteboard, and OneNote, employees can quickly see what is done, what needs to be done, and what they’ve missed. Checklists, agendas, paragraphs, tables, and agendas stay up to date no matter where they are.

Employees can collaborate on a table from OneNote in Microsoft Teams, or watch their tasks update in real-time during a meeting they’re not attending. It’s all about keeping employees in the loop no matter which application and communication method they’re using.

The addition of reply threads in Teams is another example of this. It allows users to both have a conversation in real-time and go back to it later and contribute with minimal effort and confusion.

Empowering Meetings

Make no mistake, though asynchronous communication is on the rise, meetings aren’t going anywhere. They’re still an essential part of most businesses – perhaps more so than many would wish. Meeting fatigue is a real problem for workers, and fluid components can help with this, too. Their integration in meeting recap in Teams allows users to access recaps, agendas, notes, tasks, recordings, and transcripts in a single place if they aren’t present. For certain employees, it will start to be a more effective use of time to access these resources rather than sit in on the meeting.

When a meeting is necessary, Microsoft 365 reduces the barriers that come with mixing virtual and physical participants. Compared to those in the office, virtual participants often struggle to make their voices heard. To combat this, Teams is trialing new views to place them front and center. When presenting, for example, the presenter’s head and shoulders are placed alongside their presentation so they’re front and center. Other employees are at the bottom of the screen at eye level.

Adding to this enhancement for presentations is PowerPoint live. This powerful functionality lets the presenter lay out their content in a way that fits best, improve transitions between presenters, and use tools such as laser pointing, inking, annotations, and slide translate.

Viva Connect and Insights

A driving force behind hybrid work is the fact that employees work better when they feel happy, and included. Microsoft Viva, which was introduced a year ago, is a new app designed by Microsoft to help employees thrive. Viva Connect and Viva Insights are both part of 365, the latter providing a centralized, personalized destination for employees to aggregate and share useful information, and the former helping employees to be more efficient.

Insights already delivered daily and monthly briefing emails, as well as inline suggestions in Outlook, but now it also offers new techniques to boost concentration. Focus mode uses the Pomodoro Technique to help users work in productive chunks with regular breaks. Quiet mode lets users tune out once their shift ends, creating a better work/life balance.

Finally, with Headspace integration employees can access quick mindfulness and meditation exercises to start the day peppy, reduce stress after a hard meeting, and more.

Guiding Your Hybrid Future

Changes such as these can be scary. Many organizations are worried about maintaining productivity, keeping information secure, and ensuring the workplace and its internal communications don’t fall apart due to unexpected downtime.

When you partner with VirtuWorks for Microsoft 365, we’re there to guide and support you. Our expert team will help you transition in a way that makes sense to your business. With their hundreds of years of combined experience, they’re well-equipped to resolve issues, keep an eye on your security, and keep prices down.

Reach out to VirtuWorks today and learn how we can help you get the most out of Microsoft 365 in these shifting times.

Microsoft Azure Services are incredibly powerful tools for IT professionals and developers. By tapping into Microsoft’s global network of data centers, they can create, deploy, and manage applications in a hybrid cloud environment that are highly available while being cost and resource-efficient.

The can of that statement can’t be emphasized enough, however. What’s often not discussed is how much your Azure experience can vary depending on who you choose as your Azure Services Provider. Choose a partner with a poor support team, pre-packaged offers, or mediocre monitoring infrastructure, and you may find yourself paying far more than you expected with fewer benefits than you imagined.

While some providers market packaged offers, that are essentially a one-size-fits-all mentality, as a selling point, at VirtuWorks we believe it’s far from that. While a packaged offer can make budgeting simpler, it also means that there’s a distinct possibility you’ll end up overpaying for your service.

Further, it typically means that your provider either hasn’t invested in, or hasn’t made available the tools needed to monitor your data consumption on a granular level. This ultimately means that you lose visibility and control. You’re unable to see how much money you’re wasting and whether you’d be better off with a different provider.

With Azure Services and More, VirtuWorks Does Things Differently

In its mission to provide customers with unbeatable value, VirtuWorks has invested heavily in the creation of bespoke tools that let us determine your granular data consumption. As a result, when you partner with VirtuWorks there are no bundles, no packages – we bill you for data you use, and nothing more.

In the interest of accountability, planning, and monitoring, this information is passed on to the client. Our MSPControl portal lets you see how much data you have spent on each Azure service in any given month, including the Azure app service, cognitive services, recovery and backup services, and more. We even show you this on a per-day level so that you can make data-driven decisions surrounding your usage.

Of course, the fear most people have with usage-based billing is that they’ll inadvertently blow past their budget. As a result, we allow admins to set hard and soft usage caps, as well as budget alerts. These are further informed by a spending forecast so you can adjust habits well in advance.

All of this is backed up by the VirtuWorks team of over 25 expert engineers, consultants, and security experts, who help you get what you want out of your services while being there to aid with any potential disruptions.

So, whether you’re looking to provision virtual machines, host a DNS domain, create apps, or manage your IoT, reach out to VirtuWorks today. We’ll help you do it in an efficient, fair, and cost-effective way.

Though application and server management are something most employees will never think about, they play a key role in a business’s ability to innovate. Though it’s easy to focus on flashy solutions, ensuring your organization’s core needs are met well will have a far greater impact.

While it’s true that people and ideas are key to innovation, so is bringing the product to market quickly. To move swiftly, though, your workers must have the applications they need available on-demand with good performance. Your business must also have a stable server infrastructure that can weather any storm and quickly scale to meet demand.

All of these things are basic in theory, but hard to execute in practice. Successfully reducing downtime and slowdowns requires personnel to keep on top of everything from patches and updates to physical hardware to configuration changes, malware threats, virtual machines, licensing, and more. To make things more complex, this often has to happen across a range of different cloud environments, across multiple data centers and locations.

When factoring in investment in hosting, monitoring software, wages, and recruitment, IT costs start to spiral.

Typically, then, it’s more effective to outsource your server and application management to a managed service provider who already has the staff, expertise, and software to ensure your business runs as smoothly as it can.

VirtuWorks Can Help with Server and Application Management

When you partner with VirtuWorks for your IT services, our team of highly skilled engineers, consultants, and security experts will ensure that your servers remain live and your applications perform well.

As well as performing remote software installation, configuration, and compliance checks, VirtuWorks will ensure that your server and application management systems are updated and patched on time. Our engineers will also take care of remote server management, including:

• Monthly release, review, and testing of new and approved Microsoft security patches
• Monthly disk defragmentation, checks, and cleanups
• Disk capacity management
• Configuration changes
• Microsoft Active Directory and Exchange management

Our engineers will also keep on top of your day-to-day, managing everything from corporate media sites to virtual infrastructure, hardware utilization, customer/licensed software, Microsoft servers, Linux servers, virtual environments, and public, private, and hybrid cloud environments.

Keeping services running smoothly also requires good security. It’s important to be both proactive and reactive, deploying and managing effective anti-malware and anti-virus solutions while being there to correct threats and viruses should they slip through. This is exactly what VirtuWorks offers through its team of experienced security experts.

In fact, should any issue arise with your servers and applications, malware, technical, or otherwise, VirtuWorks support will be there 24/7 to help, both remotely and on-site when needed.

By relying on a trusted partner to take care of all of these aspects, you give your employees the best chance of remaining productive, creative, and stress-free. Importantly, you do so without over-inflating your budget or being forced to navigate the ever-present IT skills shortage.

To find out more about how VirtuWorks can help you with your server and application management, get in touch here.