5 Tips to Search Properly

How many times have we said to ourselves or to a coworker “I need the memo Joe sent last week on the 2Q numbers.” Now, is it still in email? Did you file it in Dropbox from your mobile device? Or is it a desktop file?  Before you start searching for the file, take a minute to think about the best way to do so.  These tips should help to make your searches more productive and convert a search into a FIND.

1.     Prepare to search: Make sure you know what you’re looking for. Going back to the memo from Joe, do you in actuality call it a memo? How can you find what you’re looking for if you can’t remember the specifics? Try and think of a unique word that will help narrow down your results. Joe is keen on using words like extraordinary, which will reveal fewer results than all emails from Joe, 2Q, which will yield a quarter’s worth of files.

2.     Use search to narrow your search: Don’t be scared to use more than one search to get your results. Search within your results to keep narrowing your list down. In this case, we start with extraordinary results, which yields files from every quarter and early quarter estimate from the past 5 years. The second search adds the name of the newest and biggest client signed in 2Q, which reduces the number of results.

3.     Learn search syntax: Using quote marks on your keyword search terms or use search terms such as NEAR, AND, OR to significantly  narrow the accuracy of your returned results. Try “extraordinary results” Joe NEAR “big, new customer’s name” and we’re getting closer.

4.     Organize your search by dates: Narrow your results by narrowing down the timeline  We know we want 2Q results, which are always released 2 weeks after the close of the quarter so narrow the search to July 1, 2015 and more recent and voila, you found the results file. Obviously, I wrote these tips to build on the one previous, but you can without a doubt, skip or combine steps to find exactly what you need without involving your neighbor in the next cubicle, your assistant or make Joe resend the file  so it’s at the top of your inbox.

5.     All the above apply to a web search plus a final one. i.e. try a different search engine. If you always use Google, try Bing, Yahoo or Dogpile and your results may vary.

While search implies carefully or thoroughly seeking something, would you not prefer to find what you need more by happenstance and ease? This can happen to you if you understand the best way to search for needed documents and other files.  Happy Finding.

4 Tips to Proactively Protect Your Data

Most people are a bit contradictory in the way they think about security. We rush to lock our front doors and password-protect our PCs, but we leave the keys under the mat and prominently place sticky notes with the computer passwords above our desks. The time has come for us to take responsibility for network, data and application security. Here are some tips on how to do that.

1. Know your network: Think about who you share your data with. Be conscious of who is on your network and what you share. An email sent to your HR person with personal information can easily be shared whether intentionally or accidentally—we’ve all hit “reply all” when we only meant to reply to the sender.

Another important aspect we don’t often consider is where we access data from (i.e. Public Wi-Fi). It’s rather simple for someone to intercept your data in a man-in-the-middle attack by first setting up a network and naming it “Free Wi-Fi;” ask restaurant and airport staff the name of the network. Better yet, learn how to tether your phone and turn it in to your personal hotspot. Also keep in mind when traveling —if you sync your phone to the rental car system, remember to wipe it before returning the car rather than trusting that the rental company.

2. Set permissions on your data: Learn how to set up permissions to keep others out of it.

You ultimately have responsibility for your data. If your bank account is hacked, you may need to prove your password was protected and you did what was necessary to guard against a breach. You must also be careful of the apps you download and if these apps require a password, don’t regularly repeat the same one. When picking a new password, use common sense and don’t check “Remember Me.” It might be easier, but doing so gives the site or application a cookie that is open to misappropriation.

3. Less is more: Keep your most sensitive information on the fewest number of different computers or cloud-based tools as possible.

Having fewer copies of your most sensitive documents helps protect it. While the cloud provides convenience and ability to access information from multiple devices, are you really going to need to access all your bills, bank accounts, and investment statements from everywhere? Disable Remote Desktop (RDP) unless you require these features. Additionally, it is best not to enable remote connections to your PC unless needed at the time. Instead, enable the remote connections when needed, and disable them when you’re finished.

4. Encrypt your data

Add an extra level of security to your sensitive data. In our mobile world, this will especially help as your data goes back and forth in the cloud. While encrypting files can be a little difficult, it’s like anything else —practice makes perfect and once it becomes a habit, it is easy. Better yet, automatic authentication frees us from even thinking about it. Full data encryption solutions encrypt the entire hard drive from the operating system to all applications and data stored on it. As information is read from the disk, it is decrypted and then any information written to the disk is encrypted in turn. Without the encryption key, the data stored on the disk remains inaccessible.

The number of data breaches occurring each year, month, day even, is continuing to grow. Hopefully the above tips will help you combat some of these security breaches and enable you to take measures to keep your personal data protected.