Adobe is offering 39% off Creative Cloud for a whole year.
Visit the link below to get 39% off the entire Creative Cloud suit for a whole year. The price is now £30.34 per month, reduced from £49.94 per month. This includes 20+ creative applications and services for design, video, web and more. Also includes from 100GB of cloud storage. Offer ends 3 December 2021.
Cloud Office Security provides advanced protection for Microsoft 365. This service is now enhanced with Dynamic Threat Defense at no extra cost.
Dynamic Threat Defense gives zero-day threat defence by picking up potential threats which haven’t been seen before and don’t yet match any known malware signatures. These are then analysed in an isolated sandbox in the cloud, running a whole battery of tests to determine if a file is suspicious or not. This is carried out using powerful cloud computing, and an analysis should be complete within under five minutes.
Such emergent threats are usually extremely hard to detect by traditional signature-matching solutions. This is perfect for defending against ransomware, targeted attacks, data breaches, and questionable email attachments. This advanced layer of protection will soon be available at no additional cost.
We will activate this for all our existing Cloud Office Security customers in early December, so you don’t have to do anything to benefit from the next-level security!
If you don’t yet have Cloud Office Security to protect your Microsoft 365 infrastructure, contact us now.
EDIT: Dynamic Threat Defense was renamed to LiveGuard Advanced in March 2022.
Salesforce’s deadline for Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA) is the start of February.
We previously announced that Salesforce will require Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA) to increase the security and protection for users. We’d like to remind you that the deadline to have MFA enabled is 1 February 2022.
MFA is one of the most effective tools for enhancing login security and safeguarding your data and business. A 2019 report from Microsoft concluded that MFA blocks 99.9% of all automated attacks. As Salesforce is a tool often used to store consumer information and personal data, this enforced requirement makes perfect sense from a security perspective.
Salesforce recommend using their MFA Assistant under Setup for step-by-step guidance.
GoDaddy announced yesterday that the data of up to 1.2 million of its customers was exposed, due to hackers gaining access to its Managed WordPress hosting service.
GoDaddy is one of the world’s largest domain registrars and a web hosting company providing services to more than 20 million customers worldwide. The breach was discovered by GoDaddy on 17 November, but the hackers had access since at least 6 September.
Demetrius Comes, GoDaddy’s Chief Information Security Officer, said: “Using a compromised password, an unauthorized third party accessed the provisioning system in our legacy code base for Managed WordPress. Our investigation is ongoing and we are contacting all impacted customers directly with specific details.”
We use GoDaddy for domain registration only, and have never recommended their hosting services due to multiple security and performance issues. If you are a GoDaddy customer using WordPress hosting services with them, we recommend you change all passwords and conduct a security audit immediately.
This year our office will be closed for the holidays from Thursday 23 December through Monday 3 January. Our last day will be Wednesday 22 December 2021, and we will be back on Tuesday 4 January 2022.
Please note that during this time support is available with contract only. For support whilst we are closed, please raise a ticket at directionforward.com/support or email [email protected]. Please note that all other contact methods will not be monitored during this time including phone calls, emails and texts.
We wish you all happy holidays and best wishes for the new year!
Microsoft is ending support for the OneDrive desktop sync app on Windows 7, 8, and 8.1 on 1 January 2022.
Updates for OneDrive for these versions of Windows will no longer be provided, and, starting 1 March, users on these versions of Windows will no longer be able to sync their content to the cloud using the OneDrive sync app.
Microsoft announced its plans to retire the OneDrive sync app on older versions of macOS back in August, and now the time has come for older versions of Windows as well.
Microsoft recommend users upgrade to a newer version of Windows before next year. For users on machines unable to run Windows 10 or 11, and who have to stay on older versions of Windows, can still access files on their local machines (but files will not automatically sync) and use OneDrive on the web to upload/download.
To discuss upgrading your Windows version, please contact us. For some, upgrades to Windows 10 may be free, and we also have one-off Windows 10 upgrade licenses available for £49.99+VAT.
The above graphic (courtesy of Hive Systems) indicates how long it takes to hack into passwords, dependent on the number of characters the password has and if it includes numbers, uppercase letters and symbols.
Passwords consisting of ten numbers or fewer can be hacked instantly, as there is a limited finite number of variations to attempt. This is a huge contrast to passwords consisting of a mix of numbers and both lower- and uppercase letters with more than 10 digits, which would take than 41 years or more to hack.
For more advice on how to create and use secure passwords, please see our previous news post here.
Microsoft Office 2021 has been released, including products like Word, Excel, PowerPoint, OneNote, and OneDrive.
Microsoft Office 2021 will be available on Windows 10 or Windows 11 devices and is compatible on Mac for the last three major macOS releases. The pricing hasn’t changed from the last release, costing £249.99 for a one-off purchase and £9.40 for a Standard monthly licence.
A notable new feature of Office 2021 is the new Dark Mode which is darker than the original release. The applications, such as Word, Excel etc, will all now include a Microsoft Search bar for general search queries. Upgrades have also been added to Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook and Visio, such as new XLOOKUP search feature, a new visual look, more Excel commands, and new translation tools in Outlook.
As a Microsoft Partner we can provide a discount on all Microsoft products; please contact us if you would like to upgrade to Office 2021 as a one-time purchase. Please note that Microsoft 365 Business Standard & Premium licenses always include the latest version of Office and its applications.