What's Wrong with your Password?
What’s Wrong with your Password?
Passwords are the first line of defense against break-ins on your phone, computer and online accounts. Thieves are clever. They come up with tricks to grab your password, with or without your knowledge. When we create passwords, we either make something that’s easy to type – a common pattern – things that remind us of the word password – the account that we’ve created the password for – or we think about things that make us happy. While this makes typing and remembering your password more fun, it also makes it a lot easier to guess your password.
Now days, we are told that our passwords need to have a lot of “entropy” – a lack of order or predictability. If you haven’t gotten around to using a password manager yet, you’re not alone. Even Lorrie Cranor, the past chief technologist at the Federal Trade Commission, who helped protect consumers from online crimes, only started using one in late 2016. “I’ve been advocating password managers for years, but I’d never actually tried one,” Cranor says. These services can help defend against criminals by generating and storing a different password—one that’s long and complicated—for each of your online accounts. But deciding which password manager to trust with the keys to your online life may seem daunting.
What Are Password Managers, Exactly?
Most of us either use weak passwords or reuse passwords on multiple accounts. This makes us more susceptible to crimes such as identity theft. A password manager will generate, retrieve, and keep track of super-long, crazy-random passwords across countless accounts for you, while also protecting all your vital online info—not only passwords but PINs, credit-card numbers and their three-digit CVV codes, answers to security questions, and more—with encryption so strong that it might take a hacker between decades and forever to crack. And to get all that security, you’ll only need to remember a single password, the one you use to unlock your so-called vault. Your login data will be locked down and, at the same time, remain right at your fingertips.
What to Look for in a Password Manager?
A dedicated password manager will store your passwords in an encrypted form, help you generate secure random passwords, offer a more powerful interface, and allow you to easily access your passwords across all the different computers, smartphones, and tablets you use. When researching Password Managers, look for the following features:
• Generate unique passwords
• Two-factor authentication
• Quick secure signing across multiple platforms
• Automatic bookmark-style logins
• Change dozens of passwords with one click
• Instant security alerts
• Provides secure access to your passwords wherever you are
• Supports Windows Biometric Framework, Apple Touch ID and Face ID
• AES-256 encryption
Most password managers offer strong security: AES-256 encryption, which is used by the federal government to protect classified information. But what we see is easy-to-use software with nifty features such as alerts when one of your sites or services has been breached, the ability to change your old passwords automatically on certain sites, seamless syncing, and a smart, engaging interface.
Don’t Reuse Passwords!
Password reuse is a serious problem because of the many password leaks that occur each year, even on large websites. When your password leaks, malicious individuals have an email address, username, and password combination they can try on other websites. If you use the same login information everywhere, a leak at one website could give people access to all your accounts. If someone gains access to your email account in this way, they could use password-reset links to access other websites, like your online banking or a PayPal account.
We put ourselves at risk when we take an apathetic approach to creating, using and protecting our passwords. To prevent password leaks from being so damaging, you need to use unique passwords on every website. A password manager will take a load off your mind, freeing up brain power. For more information on ways to secure your business processes, visit www.kechie.com or www.myofficeapps.com.
The Worst Supply Chain Mistakes And How To Avoid Them
The Worst Supply Chain Mistakes And How To Avoid Them
Supply Chains are improving continuously and rapidly. This means that managers are seeing an increase in challenges that arise with these changes. As these continue, the chances of something going wrong is more than likely. Without minimizing these problems, they are only going to snowball into something worse. Here are the worst supply chain mistakes, and how to avoid them to better streamline your supply chain processes.
Still Relying On Spreadsheets
Many companies start out using spreadsheets when they first start to track their inventory. As your company evolves, however, so does your data. By continuing to track inventory on a spreadsheet, you’re only digging yourself in a deeper hole. As a business grows, so do the problems that start to arise without a proper inventory management software.
It’s time to upgrade when:
- Inventory isn’t being updated automatically
- It’s not accessible on the go
- You are losing track of inventory
- Too much time tracking/ dealing with errors and reports
- You are combining various software together
Prevent these errors by investing in a full enterprise resource planning (ERP) software. The importance of inventory tracking is evident, and essential to productivity. With a good inventory management system you can easily update without having to modify multiple spreadsheets. Not to mention, you will have the ability to project your future inventory needs.
Poor Customer Service
What happens when customers aren’t happy with your service, lack of availability of products, and denied orders? You lose business. The cause always stems down to the unavailability of products.
With problems like inaccurate demand forecasts, late deliveries from suppliers, data integrity issues, unreliable suppliers, lack of or unreliable formal planning system, unreliable production schedules, poor on time manufacturing schedule performance and organizational issues such lack of teamwork, lack of communication and lack of accountability, there’s always something that can go wrong.
Make sure to accurately look at data and predict your inventory. Good customer service depends on the visibility of information. It is necessary to provide and receive the most amount of data as possible to make the necessary changes in the supply chain before it becomes a problem. It takes a good inventory management software integrated with an ERP to fully manage your orders.
Inaccurate Planning
Market intelligence is the secret formula to planning a business’s future. Purchasing and selling cannot decided upon without much planning. With the mass amounts of products being sold/bought and money being spent, there is no room to leave out planning. To properly plan, however, a company needs to have accurate data. It needs to know what it already has, how it’s going to sell, buy, and stock on a continuous basis. Sadly, many companies even today do not formally forecast. Many companies employ highly intelligent, highly paid executives to spend their time gathering sales data for them to massage it in an Excel Spreadsheet to develop a forecast – a process that at times takes a few days. More often than not, they spend 95% of this time gathering data and 5% of the time in evaluating results. Get a modern software that will give you the ability to plan properly by tracking ins and outs like it should. Something that will flag you down when inventory is not where it should be.
Keep your supply chain running at optimum efficiency. It can be as simple as applying a few necessary steps to make sure it runs smoothly. Start by upgrading from spreadsheets to something that can actually help and manage your supply chain well. Optimize your customer service and make sure you always have what your customers want in stock. Lastly, use the market intelligence from your Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) software to be aware and plan for optimal performance.
