6 Tips to Keep Your Sage 100 Mobile Data Secure

Mobility and cloud applications have made great inroads into manufacturing and warehousing operations. While these new technologies have provided significant benefits, they have also placed a renewed importance on cybersecurity. (For more information on these trends, see our blog, 8 Warehouse Management Technology Trends in 2016.) Scanco’s Sage 100 mobile applications, such as Scanco Sales and Scanco Service, bring your Sage 100 data to your employees where and when they need it. However, while providing these capabilities to your employees, it is also important to remind them of good cybersecurity practices.
Your Sage 100 software and other core enterprise systems hold critical corporate information that could harm your business if its security is compromised. There are many security functions built into Scanco’s Sage 100 mobile apps, but it is still important to train your employees about security.

In fact, the greatest vulnerability of corporate software isn’t the system itself, but the employee who is using it. Employees are the weakest link in system security. The number one way to keep your Sage 100 ERP data safe is to educate your employees. Train your employees to understand the types of attacks they may face and how to address them. All it takes is one employee to take the bait for your entire system to be compromised.

You can reduce corporate risk by providing timely and repeated security awareness training. As part of new hire training, you should include company security policies. Be sure to coincide training with testing. Employees learn best through mock scenarios. Use simulated attacks that are relevant to the employees’ daily jobs. Then provide feedback on what they did right or wrong.

Key Training To Keep Your Sage 100 Mobile Data Secure

1. Install updates regularly. Teach your employees to install updates to stay current on security enhancements. The critical updates are continually closing software vulnerabilities. We are always susceptible, but one way to stay safer is to not be as vulnerable as others. In many cases, hackers will go for the low-hanging fruit, so you don’t want to be the one who didn’t install the update.
2. Don’t click on links in email unless you are very sure. Teach your employees to look at the http: behind the link before they click on it. That will tell them if it’s going to send them to an unknown website.  If they do click on the link and are told that they must install some software to read the file or do the download, stop!  Before they allow anything to be installed on their system, verify with the sender that a) he/she sent it and b) that it’s supposed to install something. If they do not know the sender, do not even click on it.
3. Read all URLs from right to left. The last address is the true domain. Secure URLs that don’t employ https are fraudulent, as are sites that begin with IP addresses.
4. Check back with the sender if anything is out of the ordinary. Send a separate email (not a reply) or make a phone call to determine if the email is valid. In one real example, an IT manager supposedly sent an email to an employee explaining that an important update could not be done remotely so a security firm had been contracted to help with the client installation.  The 800 number provided actually went to the hacker, who then used GoToMeeting to get access to the employee’s system, browsed to an official looking site and downloaded and installed malware without the employee ever knowing. In this case, if the employee had been the least bit suspicious he/she could have called the IT manager to make sure it was legitimate.
5. Never provide account information or passwords through email. Phishing, like the example above, is the greatest security threat to your employees.
6. Eliminate careless Internet browsing. Institute a policy that prevents certain sites from being accessed. This greatly reduces your chance of having your business’ security compromised.

Don’t assume that your employees are aware of security threats. By implementing this leading practice to keep your Sage 100 ERP data safe, you will move a long way toward reducing the threat of cyber attacks in your business.
Scanco offers Sage 100 mobile applications that keep current with cybersecurity trends. If you need a business partner to help you navigate the latest warehouse technology, to empower your sales force, or to enable mobile field service, give us a call.