26th Oct 2017 | Consultancy, GDPR, Salesforce, Security and Safety
GDPR Masterclass
Led by Chris Roberts of the GDPR Alliance.
Is your business ready for the new data protection regulations?
On May 25th 2018, less than a year away, the European Data Protection Regulations (GDPR) comes into force. This represents the most significant change to data privacy regulations for more than 20 years. With significant non-compliance penalties including financial ones of up to 4% of global revenue or €20m, it is essential that business owners understand what is coming, the potential impact it will have, and what actions are needed to ensure compliance.
Is your organisation going to be affected by GDPR?
The vast majority of businesses will hold what the regulation describes as “personal data” on an EU citizen so will need to be compliant with the regulations.
What is personal data?
Phone numbers, email addresses, home addresses, bank details, demographics, health information, sexual orientation, in fact anything that could identify a specific person.
What’s covered during the workshop?
- Why this legislation has come in to being
- The key points of the new legislation
- Likely causes of non-compliance
- Risks and penalties: what changes will you need to make?
- What actions should you consider to reduce risk
- What are implications of non-compliance?
Workshop leader
Chris Roberts a Director at Highend Software and a Co-founder of the GDPR Alliance leads these workshops. Chris regularly presents on business efficiency and productivity improvements and GDPR. Recent presentations include those for the Federation for Small Business (FSB), Superfast Business Wales, Wales Fraud Forum, BNI and numerous private clients.
Venue
The class will start at 9:00am for a 9:30am start in the Conference Room at the prestigious Beacon Centre for Enterprise in Dafen, Llanelli, SA14 8LQ.
Tickets are on sale through our ticketing portal https://bit.ly/GDPR-MC. Book early for deep discounts.
16th Oct 2017 | Consultancy, Salesforce, Security and Safety
On 5th October, I was giving a talk to a Novus Networking in Cardiff. The topic was the GDPR. Not the most exciting topic for a group of under 35s, but there you go.
At its heart the GDPR is about protecting our privacy. As the prominent privacy campaigner, Julian Assuange said, to those who doubt our need for privacy: “There is no killer answer yet. Jacob Appelbaum (@ioerror) has a clever response, asking people who say this to then hand him their phone unlocked and pull down their pants.”
Of course we know of cases where governments want backdoors into our phone security and airports have x-ray systems that reveal our unclothed bodies.
There are many great materials out there. In the next month, Cloud Genius is hoping to be running some courses on the GPRS in Llanelli. As a starter, there is an introduction (for free) on trailhead.salesforce.com
The provisional date of our masterclass will be Wednesday 22 November. It promises to be full of useful information that will help you remain compliant.
(The fines for non-compliance are up to €20M or 4% of annual global turnover, whichever is greater.)
28th Jul 2016 | Consultancy, e-Commerce, General Information, Security and Safety, Web Hosting, Websites, WordPress
How g
reat would it be if you could take credit card payments directly from you website.
It’s not as if you have an online store, but there are just one or two services that you would like to charge for. You could use PayPal, but their fees are 3.4%.
Stripe is a really good credit card processor. (After all, even billion-dollar businesses like Salesforce use them.)
Their fees are as low as 1.4% + 20p per transaction at the basic level. Much cheaper than PayPal.
The downside is that they require a website that meets the standards of TLS 1.2.
Ours do.
We can set you up with a secure website.
If you use our Safe and Secure website service, we will ensure that it meets the security standards of the future.
(BTW we do full e-Commerce websites, too.)
28th May 2016 | e-Commerce, Security and Safety, Web Hosting, Websites, WordPress
Did you know that nearly all of the information you send over the internet can be intercepted and viewed?
Think what that means for your financial information, your personal information. Is it being viewed?
To highlight this, Google is going to start marking such websites as ‘UNSAFE’. This means nearly all websites!
How is this going to affect you and your eCommerce website?
Are your customers going to buy from a website marked ‘unsafe’?
I would imagine that it would put off potential customers!!!
There is a solution. It is called a ‘certificate’.
With an electronic certificate and the correct website set-up, all the information between you and your website, or your clients and your website is totally encrypted – safe.
Until recently, such certificates were the realm of banks and large organisations.
Cloud Genius is now able to provide this service to our clients affordably.
We make a few changes to your WordPress website.
We install the certificates.
Manage the renewal of the certificates for you.
Simple! Easy! Safe and Secure! (And saving you lots of money compared to other solutions.)
Installation is just £30. The automatic renewal service is just £5 p.c.m. when paid by direct debit.
When are you going to get your website certified? and safe?
Just call us now.
3rd Jul 2015 | Defeating spam, General Information, Security and Safety
As part of my bid to live a healthier life, I have started to visit the gym regularly. It’s gets me into a good mood before work starts, it adds regularity and routine. It’s a good thing.
As I look around I am impressed by the years of commitment that the other folk have put in.1 I also noticed that some of them would put their weights and platforms and other bits in any convenient space, which is often just in front of the fire door.
It always reminds me of the phrase of a buildings inspector, ‘What time have you booked the fire?’ Obviously, you don’t know when the fire will be, so you should keep the fire exits clear at all times.
Similarly, with website security: you don’t know when the hackers or other disaster will strike. Your best defense is to ensure that your website software is all up-to-date with relevant patches, that you have security software installed and, in case all that fails, you have a backup stretching back six months (with a rapid restore option). You could do all that yourself, or you get us to manage it for you, as part of our ‘safe and secure websites’ package for WordPress. As added security, we have just added ‘noCaptcha re-Captcha’ (no more illegible text to decode, just simple questions and a tick-box) as a security option to both Woo Commerce and our website forms.
1Aside: I remember, when I joined the gym, that they showed me the range of health foods/food supplements that they had. I pointed out that if I could eat myself healthy I would be an Olympic athlete. Being in IT isn’t the best for ones physique.
21st Apr 2015 | Security and Safety
This week we have seen one of the biggest benefits of Open Source – security. Stick with me there is a BIG benefit for you. (Open Source means that the code the programs are written in is available for everyone to see.)
Joost de Valk, who writes many plug-ins for WordPress, became aware of a security flaw in some of his plug-ins. WordPress and its plug-ins are also open source, so he checked other plug-ins and found that they had the same vulnerability. He was able to work with those plug-in writers to fix the flaw. If they were all using Closed Source this would not be possible. This affects some of the big-name plug-ins such as Gravity Forms, Jetpack… See the article at https://yoast.com/coordinated-security-release/
The benefit for you is two-fold:
1) By updating the plug-ins in WordPress you will fix this vulnerability.
2) If you are signed up for our Safe and Secure Websites package we will do it for you! (And check that everything works for you, and back-up your site beforehand and every day.)
